HARVARD AGAINST OXFORD.
ELDOM—perhaps not twice in a hundred years, had such a night of excitement been known in London as that which ushered in the morning of the Twenty-Seventh of August, 1869, the ever-memorable day on which a million of half-crazy people were to witness the Great University Boat Race between Oxford and Harvard. This race, it was universally declared, would forever settle the mooted question of British pluck and American endurance, by twenty-five minutes hard pulling in two four-oared boats on the River Thames, between Putney and Mortlake.
The boasted phlegm of the English race had, as it were, disappeared before the touchstone of national rivalry, and prince, peer, peasant, and cabman alike felt that the honor of England was in the hands of Mr. Darbishire's Oxford crew.
For weeks before the race came off, the London shopkeepers, mercers, haberdashers, and drapers, had illuminated windows and doorways with neck-ties, scarfs, shoe-buckles, ribbons, silks, and hosiery, and with the greatest commercial impartiality, these articles that I have named, with a hundred others that I cannot recollect, had been made to assume the modest hues of the Oxford Dark Blue, and the blazing brilliancy of the Harvard Magenta. The merits of the men of both Universities had undergone the severest mental and conversational scrutiny in every part of the metropolis.
POLICE ARRANGEMENTS.
In a great city with a population of over three millions of Englishmen, it was but natural and just that Oxford should hold high ascendancy, and that Oxford favors should be worn almost exclusively, and that the superiority of Oxford rowing, should be with high and low a question of orthodoxy. Night settled down on the myriad roofs and church steeples of London, and ten young lads, down at the little village of Putney, with its narrow streets and old-fashioned church, braced themselves, before going to sleep, for the greatest athletic conflict that the Nineteenth century has known.