"Just at present, zur, when we do be 'avin' sich a mob lot from Lunnon, 'specially at week's-end, zur, we ain't got men enough to do our own polin'. It's the war, zur, as has took 'em off. Maybe for a few day, zur, ye might take a 'and yerself if ye didn't mind." I waved the hand referred to--the forefinger part of it--in a deprecating manner. I couldn't pole the lightest and most tractable punt ten yards in a straight line to save my own or anybody else's life. Then again, if I should impair the precision of my five fingers by any such violent exercise, my brush would wabble as nervously over my canvas as a recording needle across a steam-gauge. Poling a rudderless, keelless skiff up a crooked stream by means of a fifteen-foot balancing pole is an art only to be classed with that of rowing a gondola. Gondoliers and punters, like poets, are born, not made. My own Luigi comes of a race of gondoliers dating back two hundred years, and punters must spring from just such ancestors. No, if I had to do the poling myself, I should rather get out and walk. Fin solved the problem--not from any special training (rowing in regattas and the like), but rather from that universal adaptability of the Irishman which fits him for filling any situation in life, from a seat on a dirt-cart to a chair in an aldermanic chamber. "I am a paper-hanger by trade, sor," he began, "but I was brought up on the river and can put a punt wid the best. Try me, sor, at four bob a day; I'm out of a job." I looked him over, from his illuminated head down to his parenthetical legs, caught the merry twinkle in his eyes, and a sigh of relief escaped me. Here was not only a seafaring man, accustomed to battling with the elements, skilled in the handling of poles, and acquainted with swift and ofttimes dangerous currents, but a brother brush, a man conversant with design and pigments; an artist, keenly sensitive to straight lines, harmony of tints, and delicate manipulation of surfaces. I handed him the key at once. Thenceforward I was simply a passenger depending on his strong right arm for guidance, and at luncheon-hour upon his alert and nimble, though slightly incurved, legs for sustenance, the inn being often a mile away from my subject. And the inns!--or rather my own particular inn--the White Hart at Sonning.