at
account was considered contemptible. The fellow was sneered at that
screwed up his face as if in a cloud of suffocating dust, and fought the
water with noise and fury, putting forth enough energy to carry him a
mile, and actually going about two feet if he were headed down stream.
Scientific men say that the use of the limbs, first on one side and then
on the other, is instinctive to all creatures of the monkey tribe. That
is the way they do in an emergency, since that is the way to scramble up
among the tree limbs. I know that it is the easiest way to swim, and
the least effective. When the arms are extended together in the breast
stroke, it is as much superior to dogfashion as man is superior to the
ape. I have always thought that to swim thus with steady and deliberate
arm action, the water parting at the chin and rising just to the root of
the underlip, was the most dignified and manly attitude the human being
could put himself in. Cow-fashion was a burlesque of this, and the
swimmer reared out of water with each stroke, creating tidal waves. It
was thought to be vastly comic. Steamboat-fashion was where a fellow
swam on his back, keeping his body up by a gentle, secret paddling
motion with his hands, while with his feet he lashed the water into
foam, like some river stern-wheeler. If he could cry: "Hoo! hoo! hoo!"
in hoarse falsetto to mimic the whistle, it was an added charm.

It was a red-headed boy from across the tracks on his good behavior at
the swimming-hole above the dam that I first saw swim hand-over-hand, or
"sailor-fashion" as we called it, rightly or wrongly, I know not. I can
hear now the crisp, staccato little smack his hand gave the water as he
reached forward.

It has ever since been my envy and despair. It is so knowing, so
"sporty." I class it with being able to wear a pink-barred shirt front
with a diamond-cluster pin in it; with having my clothes so nobby and
stylish that one thread more of modishness would be beyond the human
power to endure; with being genuinely fond of horseracing; with being
a first-class poker player, I mean a really first-class one; with being
able to swallow a drink of whisky as if I liked it instead of having
to choke it down with a shudder; with knowing truly great men like
Fitzsimmons, or whoever it is that is great now, so as to be able to
slap him on the back and say: "Why, hello! Bob, old boy, how are you?"
with being delighted with the company of actors, inste