I DON'T know what we were about to let Miss Wick miss the Boats,' said Mr. Mafferton one day, over his after-noon-tea in Lady Torquilin's flat. I looked at Lady Torquilin, and said I thought Mr. Mafferton must be mistaken; I had never missed a boat in my life, and, besides, we hadn't been going anywhere by boat lately. The reason we had put off our trip to Richmond five times was invariably because of the weather. Peter Corke happened to be there that afternoon, too, though she didn't make much of a visit. Miss Corke never did stay very long when Mr. Mafferton was there--he was a person she couldn't bear. She never called him anything but 'That.' She declared you could see hundreds of him any afternoon in Piccadilly, all with the same hat and collar and expression and carnation in their button-holes. She failed to see why I should waste any portion of my valuable time in observing Mr. Mafferton, when I had still to see 'Dolly's Chop House,' and Guy the King-maker's tablet in Warwick Lane, and the Boy in Panyer Alley, and was so far unimproved by anything whatever relating to Oliver Goldsmith or Samuel Johnson. She could not understand that a profoundly uninteresting person might interest you precisely on that account. But, 'Oh you aborigine!' she began about the Boats, and I presently understood another of those English descriptive terms by which you mean something that you do not say. The discussion ended, very happily for me, in an arrangement suggested jointly by Miss Corke and Mr. Mafferton. Lady Torquilin and I should go to Oxford to see 'the Eights.' Mr. Mafferton had a nephew at Pembroke, and no doubt the young cub would be delighted to look after us. Miss Corke's younger brother was at Exeter, and she would write to the dear boy at once that he must be nice to us. Peter was very sorry she couldn't come herself--nothing would have given her greater pleasure, she said, than to show me all I didn't know in the Bodleian.