The origin of the boating spirit is no doubt what the Oxonian calls slacking, for one has to learn to paddle in a boat before he can row to advantage; and in point of fact the bumping races are supposed to have originated among parties of slackers returning at evening from up the river. If I were to try to define what a slacker is, I suppose you could answer that all Oxford men are slackers; but there are depths beneath depths of _far niente_. The true slacker avoids the worry and excitement of breakfast parties and three-day cricket matches, and conserves his energies by floating and smoking for hours at a time in his favorite craft on the Isis and the Cherwell--or "Char," as the university insists on calling it. He is a day-dreamer of day-dreamers; and despised as he is by the more strenuous Oxford men, who yet stand in fear of the fascination of his vices, he is as restful a figure to an American as a negro basking on a cotton-wharf, and as appealing as a beggar steeped in Italian sunlight. Merely to think of his uninterrupted calm and his insatiable appetite for doing nothing is a rest to occidental nerves; and though one may never be a roustabout and loaf on a cotton-wharf, one may at any time go to Oxford and play through a summer's day at slacking. Before you come out, you must make the acquaintance of the O.U.H.S.--that is, the University Humane Society. In the winter, when there is skating, the Humane Society man stands by the danger spot with a life-buoy and a rope; and in the summer, when the streams swarm with pleasure-craft, he wanders everywhere, pulling slackers out of the Isis and the Char. In view of the fact that, metaphorically speaking at least, you can shake hands with your neighbors across either of these streams, the Humane Society man is not without his humors. You may get yourself a tub or a working-boat or a wherry, a rob-roy or a dinghy, for every craft that floats is known on the Thames; but the favorite craft are the Canadian canoe and the punt. The canoe you will be familiar with, but your ideas of a punt are probably derived from a farm-built craft you have poled about American duck-marshes--which bears about the same relationship to this slender, half-decked cedar beauty that a canal-boat bears to a racing-shell.