Rowing--Dame Hooper’s--Southey at Balliol--Cox’s six-oared crew--The riverside barmaid--Sailing-boats--Statutes against games--Bell-ringing--Hearne and gymnasia--Horses and badger-baiting--Cock-fights and prize-fights--Paniotti’s Fencing Academy--Old-time “bug-shooters”--Skating in Christ Church meadows--Cricket and the Bullingdon Club--Walking tours. It would be impossible to live in Oxford and be healthy--except perhaps in the summer term, if we are lucky enough to have any sun--without taking exercise. It has long been a matter of wonder how those men keep fit who, with the excuse of “having a heart” neither row, play soccer, rugger, hockey, or any other of the strenuous games which keep the average Undergraduate sound in wind and limb. As a matter of fact they don’t. For the “heart-y” gentlemen almost invariably take as many week-ends out of Oxford as possible, and in most cases retire comfortably and ingloriously to the paternal establishment and maternal care long before term is over. The others, the normal people, the devotees of bone and muscle, the “muddied oafs and flannelled fools”--(which is the only mistake Mr Kipling ever made)--are never ill, at least from climatic effects. They may strain something, or even break a few bones, but that cannot be put down to the Oxford weather. The best doctors on earth, or rather the best preventatives against illness--and there is a great difference--are the river, the football and hunting fields, and the boxing ring, and as we find these things to be true to-day so in old times, when wigs and ruffles were somewhat of a handicap to the taking of hard exercise, these remedies against the Oxford climate were adopted with almost the same keenness. The word almost is used advisedly because the percentage of “bloods” who did nothing strenuous was far larger, and the possibilities in things sporting were not nearly so great. We have changed all that, and can afford a smile of condescension when, seated on the alleviating pontius in a “Rough” eight, with its simple-looking sliding seat, its hair-thick outer shell and its wonderful travelling possibilities, we think of the heavy gigs and six-oared boats into which our predecessors “tumbled,” clad in catskin caps and leather trousers.