To-day the Thames has become the River of Pleasure. Music floats from club lawns; every reach from Richmond up to Wargrave is joyous with the laughter from skiffs and punts and launches. The locks, ever filling and emptying, give entrance and egress to as many river craft on this one day as in earlier times passed in the whole three hundred and sixty-five. There is a line of house-boats on nearly every reach, and from beneath their awnings, white or striped or apple green, there come the strumming of the banjo and the pop of the champagne cork. On the lawns sloping from week-end houses to the stream happy groups assemble. The men in flannels, the girls in white and cream-coloured fabrics, make for the tennis-courts or for the flotilla moored to the landing-stage in which the lawn meets the river. Yes; in any attempt to assign the causes which were instrumental in banishing the Puritan Sabbath from London, the Thames must be accorded a place of honour. The Thames first showed the Londoner the way out. And the motor car continued and extended the exodus. It must not be supposed that the old order was permitted to yield place to new without a word of protest here and there. Among other of the many remonstrants were the Reverend and Right Reverend Fathers in God forming the Upper House of Convocation. The action of this episcopal court brings me to the point at which the Press touches the question, and renders this matter of Sunday observance germane to the general scheme of my book. Singular as it may appear, the original factor which set the Upper House of Convocation reflecting on the matter was an article by Mr. “Jimmy” Davis in his own paper, the _Bat_. That a gentleman of the Jewish faith should have succeeded in influencing the episcopal chiefs of the English Christians may, on the first blush of it, appear strange. But it is not more strange than the other fact that some of those very Bishops owed their preferment to a Jewish Prime Minister. The whole incident of Jimmy’s interposition, and its results, make an interesting story, though a long one, I am afraid. At this juncture, then, let me address you, who have followed me thus far, in the words that appear in the middle of the stodgy parts of Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great”: “Courage, reader!” While freedom was thus making for itself wider boundaries, Jimmy Davis was very much in the movement. And being in the movement, he would naturally take an interest in the Pelican Club, which was the most advanced, unconventional, and at times rowdy, protest that had so far been made against the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy. Although I was a member of the Pelican Club myself, I do not remember whether Davis was. Nor need I take the trouble to make inquiries, as the fact does not affect my narrative. Probably he was _not_. For the institution was founded by a gentleman who had at one time been in his employ in an inferior capacity. Certainly I never met him on the premises.