who has been lying there asleep for the last two
hours, partially wakes up on being thus appealed to, and recollects all
about the matter, and also remembers that there was an unusually strong
stream against them all the way--likewise a stiff wind.

"About thirty-four miles, I suppose, it must have been," adds the first
speaker, reaching down another cushion to put under his head.

"No--no; don't exaggerate, Tom," murmurs Jack, reprovingly; "thirty-three
at the outside."

And Jack and Tom, quite exhausted by this conversational effort, drop off
to sleep once more. And the two simple-minded youngsters at the sculls
feel quite proud of being allowed to row such wonderful oarsmen as Jack
and Tom, and strain away harder than ever.

When I was a young man, I used to listen to these tales from my elders,
and take them in, and swallow them, and digest every word of them, and
then come up for more; but the new generation do not seem to have the
simple faith of the old times. We--George, Harris, and myself--took a
"raw 'un" up with us once last season, and we plied him with the
customary stretchers about the wonderful things we had done all the way
up.

We gave him all the regular ones--the time-honoured lies that have done
duty up the river with every boating-man for years past--and added seven
entirely original ones that we had invented for ourselves, including a
really quite likely story, founded, to a certain extent, on an all but
true episode, which had actually happened in a modified degree some years
ago to friends of ours--a story that a mere child could have believed
without injuring itself, much.

And that young man mocked at them all, and wanted us to repeat the feats
then and there, and to bet us ten to one that we didn't.

We got to chatting about our rowing experiences this morning, and to
recounting stories of our first efforts in the art of oarsmanship. My
own earliest boating recollection is of five of us contributing
threepence each and taking out a curiously constructed craft on the
Regent's Park lake, drying ourselves subsequently, in the park-keeper's
lodge.

After that, having acquired a taste for the water, I did a good deal of
rafting in various suburban brickfields--an exercise providing more
interest and excitement than might be imagined, especially when you are
in the middle of the pond and the proprietor of the materials of which
the raft is constructed suddenly appears on the bank, with