The river water does not change, but the banks have altered from grass and reeds to concrete and stone. It was a mile or so from Barnes Bridge, in a field near Barn Elms (but who could guess where?) that the second Duke of Buckingham fought and shot Lord Shrewsbury. The Duke left behind him one of the wickedest lives of the most dissolute Courts of English history; but he left nothing viler than the name of Lord Shrewsbury's Countess, who rode in boy's clothes as a page to the duelling ground, and then held her seducer's horse while he shot her husband. They left him dying and rode back together. That was in 1667; an earlier and a kindlier association of Barn Elms is a resident who afterwards died at Chertsey, Abraham Cowley; later came Jacob Tonson, bibliophile and publisher of Pope and Dryden. And it was at Barn Elms, too, that the Kit-Kat Club, the thirty who dined at Christopher Kat's in the Strand, and bound themselves to uphold the Protestant succession, met and dined and looked at their portraits painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller. The Kit-Kat portraits are now at Bayfordbury, near Hertford, and for the last fifteen years Barn Elms has housed, not publishers or painters, but polo players. The Ranelagh Club was born to help Hurlingham over the water provide grounds for the youngest of the great games naturalised in England. Nine years later Barnes welcomed another club, Roehampton, which added three more grounds to the four of Hurlingham and Ranelagh. The Boat-race finishes at Mortlake; it starts at Putney, and Putney is the headquarters and the rendezvous of many clubs and rowing men. The Surrey bank from Putney Bridge up stream is a string of club houses, boat houses, and little wooden buildings that do duty for both, and here, on sloping banks sometimes washed by brimming tides, sometimes broad and flat by a shrunken stream on which no racing boat will set its dainty keel, London gathers on March afternoons to wait for the return of the practising crews, and to watch the blue-scarved oarsmen in and out of the boathouses and the balcony windows. There is somewhere an air of the sea-side about that stretch of gravel and open river bank; it is the sunshine on the varnish of the boats, perhaps, or a smell of tar in the wind, or of salt from the weeds that the tides leave dry; or is it the banjo of the occasional nigger blacked to get pence from the waiting crowd? On a September day a year or two ago, when Cambridge within a week was to race Harvard, I saw on that strip of road one of the very last of the genuine London Punch-and-Judy shows. Toby, of course, had gone; dogs may sit no more in frills to cadge for coppers. But the rest of it was correct enough; the chequered canvas, of the proper shade of blue, draped the wooden frame discreetly at the right moment; there was the old interval of suspense, the old, the piercing squeal, the dexterous cock of the red legs over the balcony; the crocodile came and