In order to reach the inn at Marston by four we must pole on. If we were true slackers, to be sure, we should have brought a spirit lamp and a basket of tea, and tied up in the first convenient nook on the bank; but these are heights of slacking to which the novice cannot aspire. Just beyond here we shall have to give the Thames Conservancy man threepence to roll the punt around a weir. If there were ladies with us, we should have to let them walk a quarter of a mile on shore, for just above is Parson's Pleasure, the university bathing-hole; and these men, who would not let the Yale and the Cornell athletes appear in sleeveless "zephyrs," plunge into a frequented waterway without any zephyrs at all. Above Parson's Pleasure we emerge from Mesopotamia--as the pretty river bottom is called in which the Char divides into several channels--and come in sight of the 'varsity cricket-ground. There is a game on against a picked eleven from the Marylebone Club; and every few minutes, if we waited, we might see the statuesque figures in white flannel suddenly dash after a ball or trot back and forth between the wickets. Few slackers have had energy to get beyond this point; and as we pole among the meadows, the cuckoo's homely voice emphasizes the solitude, singing the same two notes it sang to Shakespeare--and to Chaucer before him, for the matter of that. At Marston, having ordered tea of the red-cheeked housewife, it is well to ask the innkeeper for credit. He is a Parisian, whose sociological principles, it is said, were the cause of his venturing across the Channel--in Paris, a man will even go as far as that for his opinions; and while his cheery English spouse, attended by troops of his red-cheeked boys, brings out the thin buttered bread, he will revile you. What business have you to ask an honest yeoman to lend you money? If he were to go down to Oxford and ask the first gentleman he met to lend him half a crown to feed his starving family, should he get it? Should he? And what right have you to come to his house--his _home_!--and demand food at his board? You are a gentleman; but what is a gentleman? A gentleman is the dregs of the idleness of centuries! Then he will declaim about his plans for the renovation of the world. All this time his well-fed wife has been pouring out the tea and slicing the Genoa cake; and now, with a smile of reassurance, she takes our names and college. But the innkeeper's eloquence does not flag, and it will not until you tell him with decision that you have had enough. This you are loath to do, for he has furnished you with a new ideal of happiness. The cotton-wharf negro sometimes wants leisure, the repose of the cricketer is at times rudely broken in upon, and even the slacker is liable to his ducking; but to stand up boldly against the evils of the world and to picture the new Utopia while your wife averts all practical consequences, this is _otium cum dignitate_.