nd stare very hard at the water, you feel awkward--especially
if you happen to have been attempting the most distant approach to
sentimentality, for an hour or two previously.

Although experience and suffering have produced in our minds the result
we have just stated, we are by no means blind to a proper sense of the
fun which a looker-on may extract from the amateurs of boating. What can
be more amusing than Searle's yard on a fine Sunday morning? It's a
Richmond tide, and some dozen boats are preparing for the reception of
the parties who have engaged them. Two or three fellows in great rough
trousers and Guernsey shirts, are getting them ready by easy stages; now
coming down the yard with a pair of sculls and a cushion--then having a
chat with the 'Jack,' who, like all his tribe, seems to be wholly
incapable of doing anything but lounging about--then going back again,
and returning with a rudder-line and a stretcher--then solacing
themselves with another chat--and then wondering, with their hands in
their capacious pockets, 'where them gentlemen's got to as ordered the
six.' One of these, the head man, with the legs of his trousers
carefully tucked up at the bottom, to admit the water, we presume--for it
is an element in which he is infinitely more at home than on land--is
quite a character, and shares with the defunct oyster-swallower the
celebrated name of 'Dando.' Watch him, as taking a few minutes' respite
from his toils, he negligently seats himself on the edge of a boat, and
fans his broad bushy chest with a cap scarcely half so furry. Look at
his magnificent, though reddish whiskers, and mark the somewhat native
humour with which he 'chaffs' the boys and 'prentices, or cunningly
gammons the gen'lm'n into the gift of a glass of gin, of which we verily
believe he swallows in one day as much as any six ordinary men, without
ever being one atom the worse for it.

But the party arrives, and Dando, relieved from his state of uncertainty,
starts up into activity. They approach in full aquatic costume, with
round blue jackets, striped shirts, and caps of all sizes and patterns,
from the velvet skull-cap of French manufacture, to the easy head-dress
familiar to the students of the old spelling-books, as having, on the
authority of the portrait, formed part of the costume of the Reverend Mr.
Dilworth.

This is the most amusing time to observe a regular Sunday water-party.
There has evidently been up to this pe