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The man in the hired up-river boat is modest and retiring.
He likes to keep on the shady side, underneath the trees, and to do most
of his travelling early in the morning or late at night, when there are
not many people about on the river to look at him.
When the man in the hired up-river boat sees anyone he knows, he gets out
on to the bank, and hides behind a tree.
I was one of a party who hired an up-river boat one summer, for a few
days’ trip. We had none of us ever seen the hired up-river boat before;
and we did not know what it was when we did see it.
We had written for a boat—a double sculling skiff; and when we went down
with our bags to the yard, and gave our names, the man said:
“Oh, yes; you’re the party that wrote
for a double sculling skiff. It’s all right. Jim, fetch round _The
Pride of the Thames_.”
The boy went, and re-appeared five minutes afterwards, struggling with an
antediluvian chunk of wood, that looked as though it had been recently
dug out of somewhere, and dug out carelessly, so as to have been
unnecessarily damaged in the process.
My own idea, on first catching sight of the object, was that it was a
Roman relic of some sort,—relic of _what_ I do not know, possibly of a
coffin.
The neighbourhood of the upper Thames is rich in Roman relics, and my
surmise seemed to me a very probable one; but our serious young man, who
is a bit of a geologist, pooh-poohed my Roman relic theory, and said it
was clear to the meanest intellect (in which category he seemed to be
grieved that he could not conscientiously include mine) that the thing
the boy had found was the fossil of a whale; and he pointed out to us
various evidences proving that it must have belonged to the preglacial
period.
To settle the dispute, we appealed to the boy. We told him not to be
afraid, but to speak the plain truth: Was it the fossil of a pre-Adamite
whale, or was it an early Roman coffin?
The boy said it was _The Pride of the Thames_.
We thought this a very humorous answer on the part of the boy at first,
and somebody gave him twopence as a reward for his ready wit; but when he
persisted in keeping up the joke, as we thought, too long, we got vexed
with him.
“Come, come, my lad!” said our captain sharply, “don’t let us have any
nonsense. You take your mother’s washing-tub home again, and bring us a
boat.”
The boat-builder himself came up then, and assured us, on his word, as a
practical man, that the thing really was a boat—was, in fact, _the_ boat,
the “double sculling skiff” selected to take us on our trip down the
river.
We grumbled a good deal. We thought he might, at least, have had it
whitewashed or tarred—had _something_ done to it to distinguish it from a
bit of a wreck; but he could not see any fault in it.
He even seemed offended at our remarks. He said he had picked us out the
best boat in all his stock, and he thought we might have been more
grateful.
He said it, _The Pride of the Thames_, had been in use, just as it now
stood (or rather as it now hung together), for the last forty years, to
_his_ knowledge, and nobody had complained of it before, and he did not
see why we should be the first to begin.
We argued no more.
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