Mr. Bouncer, therefore, amused himself equally as much to his own satisfaction as if he had been one of the envied eight, by occasionally paddling about with Charles Larkyns in an old pair-oar, built by Davis and King, and bought by Mr. Bouncer of its late Brazenfacian proprietor, when that gentleman, after a humorous series of plucks, rustications, and heavy debts, had finally been compelled to migrate to the King's Bench, for that purification of purse and person commonly designated "whitewashing." When Charles Larkyns and his partner did not use their pair-oar, the former occupied his outrigger skiff; and the latter, taking Huz and Buz on board a sailing boat, tacked up and down the river with great skill, the smoke gracefully curling from his meerschaum or short black pipe, - for Mr. Bouncer disapproved of smoking cigars at those times when the wind would have assisted him to get through them. "Hullo, Giglamps! here we are! as the clown says in the pantermime," sung out the little gentleman as he came up with our hero, who was performing some extraordinary feats in full sight of the University crew, who were just starting from their barge; "you get no end of exercise out of your tub, I should think, by the style you work those paddles. They go in and out beautiful! Splish, splash; splish, splash! You must be one of the ~wherry~ identical Row-brothers-row, whose voices kept tune and whose ears kept time, you know. You ought to go and splish-splash in the Freshman's River, Giglamps; - but I forgot - you ain't a freshman now, are you, old feller? Those swells in the University boats look as though they were bursting with envy - not to say, with laughter," added Mr. Bouncer, ~sotto voce~. "Who taught you to do the dodge in such a stunning way, Giglamps?" "Why, last term, Charles Larkyns did," responded Mr. Verdant Green, with the freshness of a Freshman still lingering [AN OXFORD FRESHMAN 173] lovingly upon him. "I've not forgotten what he told me, - to put in my oar deep, and to bring it out with a jerk. But though I make them go as deep as I can, and jerk them out as much as possible, yet the boat ~will~ keep turning round, and I can't keep it straight at all; and the oars are very heavy and unmanageable, and keep slipping out of the rowlocks -" "Commonly called ~rullocks~," put in Mr. Bouncer, as a parenthetical correction, or marginal note on Mr. Verdant Green's words. <VG173.JPG> "And when the Trinity boat went by, I could scarcely get out of their way; and they said very unpleasant things to me; and, altogether, I can assure you that it has made me very hot." "And a capital thing, too, Giglamps, this cold November day," said Mr. Bouncer; 'I'm obliged to keep my coppers warm with this pea-coat, and my pipe. Charley came alongside me just now, on purpose to fire off one of his poetical quotations. He said that I reminded him of Beattie's ~Minstrel~:-