nd.--George performs upon the banjo.--A mournful melody.--Another wet
day.--Flight.--A little supper and a toast.

[Picture: Dog running] We spent two very pleasant days at Oxford. There
are plenty of dogs in the town of Oxford. Montmorency had eleven fights
on the first day, and fourteen on the second, and evidently thought he
had got to heaven.

[Picture: Dogs fighting] Among folk too constitutionally weak, or too
constitutionally lazy, whichever it may be, to relish up-stream work, it
is a common practice to get a boat at Oxford, and row down. For the
energetic, however, the up-stream journey is certainly to be preferred.
It does not seem good to be always going with the current. There is more
satisfaction in squaring one's back, and fighting against it, and winning
one's way forward in spite of it--at least, so I feel, when Harris and
George are sculling and I am steering.

[Picture: Dog running] To those who do contemplate making Oxford their
starting-place, I would say, take your own boat--unless, of course, you
can take someone else's without any possible danger of being found out.
The boats that, as a rule, are let for hire on the Thames above Marlow,
are very good boats. They are fairly water-tight; and so long as they
are handled with care, they rarely come to pieces, or sink. There are
places in them to sit down on, and they are complete with all the
necessary arrangements--or nearly all--to enable you to row them and
steer them.

But they are not ornamental. The boat you hire up the river above Marlow
is not the sort of boat in which you can flash about and give yourself
airs. The hired up-river boat very soon puts a stop to any nonsense of
that sort on the part of its occupants. That is its chief--one may say,
its only recommendation.

[Picture: Dog] 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