Does any one in these latter days take that old traditional Thames-side morning drink, “rum-and-milk,” that once most favoured of all up-river restoratives? Have we not, in “those dear dead days beyond recall,” as we lay in our more or less lavender-scented beds in some old-world waterside hostelry, been awakened by the clink of a trayful of glasses and heard a knock at the door, with the call, “Your rum-and-milk, sir”?
We had not ordered rum-and-milk at that untimeous hour, but as this was obviously the proper thing to be done, the custom of the country, so to say, we drank that strange drink—rather a heady and heavy drink, without question—and were promptly sent off to sleep again by it.
The charms of Streatley and of Streatley Hill have been sung by Mr. Ashby-Sterry, who is a kind of picnic and banjo poet-laureate of the Thames as it was in those famous riverside years, the ’eighties, when the charms of the river had not long since been discovered, and commercialism had not yet begun its reign: the years when Molloy and Cotsford Dick, and Marzials had just entered upon their song-writing and composing. Mr. Ashby-Sterry is not a Tennyson, but one cherishes an endearing picture of him, clothed in boating-flannels and a “blazer,” laurelled—if one may express it so—with bulrushes, and discovered seated in company with some cooling tipple, gently but firmly declining to perform any physical exertion: least of all that involved in climbing Streatley Hill, which is indeed a “breather.” Perhaps he is not even a little bit like that, really; but his writings are responsible for such a mental picture:
“ … I’m told that you
Should mount the Hill and see the view;
And gaze and wonder, if you’d do
Its merits most completely:
The air is clear, the day is fine,
The prospect is, I know, divine—