The sun broke over the London housetops on that eventful Friday morning, the Twenty-Seventh of August, with unusual brilliancy for an English sun. The weather had not been of the most promising kind for some days previous, and it was feared that the day might turn out a foggy or a rainy nuisance, and thus interfere with the pleasure which so many countless thousands had promised themselves in witnessing the race. London was astir at an early hour, and great crowds filled the streets in the direction of the railroad stations on the Surrey side of the river, and in the vicinity of the numerous steamboat wharves, for the purpose of securing an early transportation to the scene of the conflict. At 9 o'clock the stations of the Northwestern, the Metropolitan, and the London and Northwestern Railways--at Waterloo, Vauxhall, Clapham Junction, Wadsworth, Putney, Ludgate Hill, London and Blackfriars Bridges, Euston, Chalk Farm, Hammersmith, Paddington, and Westminster--were swarming with masses of men, women, and children, vainly endeavoring, struggling, pushing, and trying to obtain precedence of each other, in order to get tickets to be carried to the boat race. The different railway companies of London, in order to accommodate the tremendous number of spectators, had suspended their regular traffic and agreed to run excursion trains all day steadily until an hour before the race. The Thames Conservancy Board, which has the power to clear the river and prevent obstructions from delaying the race, had worked manfully, and by great exertions had succeeded in making every steamboat captain and owner on the river know that he would be compelled by force to remain above Putney Bridge, where the race was to begin, on penalty of £20 fine; and if rash enough to run the risk of fine, the police were to seize the offending steamer and quench her fires, and thus prevent further locomotion. One steamboat speculator had been selling tickets at two guineas a head for the steamer Venus, and had declared openly that he would pay the fine of £20 and run the boat anyhow, despite the authorities of the river and the police who swarmed, in hundreds of small boats and tiny steam launches, all over the broad surface of the Thames.