Coming home, he pointed out to them all the spots of interest and importance to the rowing man. The tavern at Iffley where the last of the Eights starts in the races; the Green Barge, at the entrance to the “Gut;” the Gut itself, that terror of young coxswains; the Long Bridges; the White Willow where the boats make their final crossing to the Berkshire bank on the journey home. Every spot had its little history. Here, in the first Torpids, he had nearly “caught a crab.” There his crew had made their final “spirt;” here they had bumped Brasenose, when the coxswain would not acknowledge the bump. There “bow” broke his oar, and nearly pitched out of the boat. Yonder, strolling quietly down the Berkshire bank, was Harvey, the Humane Society’s man. There was old George West on the Brasenose barge; there, just above, was Timms, the “Father of the Crews,” leading a quiet time of it, now that the “Eights” and the “Sculls” and “Pairs”[15] were over. Frank took the girls into the ’Varsity barge, and showed them the pictures of the old “oars,” who had rowed for Oxford at Henley and Putney; and told them what little legends had come down to him of Chitty and Meade-King, Arkell and Warre, Morrison and Woodgate; and, coming to later times, of Tinney, Willan, Yarborough, and Darbishire, the famous four who, besides their glories at Putney, licked the Yankees from Harvard; and, in later times still, of Leslie and Houblon, Edwards-Moss and Marriott. They were all heroes to Frank--these “brutal rowing men,” as Mr. Wilkie Collins deems them--these savages whose only glory is their brute strength. It has been said that English battles have been won in the Eton playing-fields. Possibly the Isis and the Cam have as much as anything to do with the feats of dogged endurance and quiet pluck that have made Alma and Inkerman, Isandula and Rorke’s Drift, immortal names in the annals of warfare. On Sunday they all went to St. Mary’s. The Vicar’s gown admitted the ladies to the seats appropriated to the wives of the Masters of Arts, and Mr. Ross to the seats of the Masters themselves. Frank, being still _de jure_ an undergraduate, had to retire to the upstair gallery. The church was crowded. People were even standing in the aisles. The sermon, by a silver-haired professor with a cherubic face, was a discourse on friendship, delivered, if somewhat monotonously, with a delicate utterance and in a delicate phraseology that was quite too charming; and if it formed a rather strange contrast to the anathemas thundered by rural Boanerges to placid congregations in sweltering country churches, the contrast was a pleasing one rather than otherwise. “Well,” said Mr. Ross as they emerged into the High, “that’s an odd sort of sermon, eh, Vicar?”