are
generally accompanied by garish wives and daughters, who spend their
time in the streets of the town where they chance to be moored,--and
they seldom are moored elsewhere than at the larger towns,--exchanging
greetings and chatting with such acquaintances as they there meet, or
idling up and down the river in the luxurious small boats of their
river-made friends. This type of house-boater himself is generally
spoken of in brisk naval asides as a "duffer," the kitchen of his boat
is a wine-closet, and, to look at him poring for hours over his paper,
one may well believe that time is heavy on his hands and that he arrives
during every summer vacation at depths of mortal ennui where "nothing
new is, and nothing true is, and no matter!"

Americans personally unacquainted with England can form little idea of
the extent to which physical culture is carried here, and the universal
summer madness for athletic sports and out-of-door amusements. The
equable climate, never too hot, never too cold, for river-pull or
cricket, is Albion's advantage in this respect over almost all the rest
of the world, and particularly over our fervid and freezing clime. Even
although this is pious England, where the gin-shops cannot open after
the noon of Sunday until the bells ring for the evening service and
"Pub" and church spring open and alight simultaneously, even in pious
England Sunday is the day of all the week on which the river takes on
its merriest aspect, and from the multitudes of familiar faces and
frequency of friendly greetings reminds one of Regent Street and the
Parks. All prosperous and proper London--the amusement is too costly for
'Arry--seems to float itself upon Thames water that day, coming up forty
land-miles from the metropolis to do so. Boats are furiously in demand,
every picnic nook is pre-empted from earliest morning, the river-side
tea-gardens are thronged, the inns are depleted of men and women in
yachting-costumes, and the locks are jammed as full as they can be of
highly-draped boats, gayly-dressed women, and circus-costumed men, the
whole scene gayer, brighter, more fantastic than any Venetian carnival
since the days of the most sumptuous of the Adriatic doges.

One or two real Venetian gondolas are kept at that river-reach where we
spent our summer. The owner of the principal one is an English nobleman
who lived long in Italy and whose twelve daughters were born there. It
is a sight to see those twelve beaut