The first suggestion that I should go out to be tubbed came from the gray-bearded dean of the college, who happened at the time to be taking me to the master for formal presentation. I told him that I had tried for my class crew, and that three days on the water had convinced the coach that I was useless. He fell a pace behind, looked me over, and said that I might at least try. As this was his only advice, I did not forget it; and when my tutor, before advising me as to my studies, also urged me to row, I gave the matter some serious thought. I found subsequently that every afternoon, between luncheon and tea, the college was virtually deserted for field, track, and river; and it dawned upon me that unless I joined the general exodus I should temporarily become a hermit. Still, my earlier unhappy experience in rowing was full in mind, and I set out for the barge humble in spirit, and prepared to be cursed roundly for three days, and "kicked out," or, as they say in Oxford, "given the hoof," on the fourth. Few memories could be so unhappy, however, as to resist the beauty of the banks of the Isis. At New Haven, the first impression an oarsman gets is said to be an odor so unwelcome that it is not to be endeared even by four years of the good-fellowship and companionship of a Yale crew. At Harvard, the Charles--"Our Charles," as Longfellow spoke of it in a poem to Lowell--too often presents aspects which it would be sacrilege to dwell on. What the "royal-towered Thame" and "Camus, reverend sire," may have been in the classic days of English poetry it is perhaps safest not to inquire; suffice it that to-day they are--and especially the Thames--all that the uninitiated imagine "our Charles." Nowhere does the sun stream more cheerfully through the moist gray English clouds; nowhere is the grass more green, the ivy more luxuriant, and the pollard willows and slender elms and poplars more dense in foliage. And every building, from the thatched farm-cottage in Christ Church meadow to the Norman church at Iffley, is, as it were, more native and more a part of creation than the grass and trees. The English oarsman, it is true, cannot be as conscious of all this as an American visitor. Yet the love of outdoors, which has been at work for centuries in beautifying the English landscape, is not the least part of the British sporting instinct. Where an American might loiter in contemplation of these woods, fields, and streams, an Englishman shoots, hunts, crickets, and rows in them.