The great clumsy busses, that look more like advertising vans than vehicles for the purpose of carrying passengers, are splendid this day with decoration. They are made, as the sign above each tells you, to carry twelve inside and sixteen outside. The drivers of the busses have a more respectable look and are more profound in their wit than the cabbies. They have a solid British look that tells plainly of roast beef and careful usage. The cabbies are to the buss drivers a sort of gypsies, and are looked upon by them with suspicion. Every omnibus is crowded with passengers this cheerful, sunny day.
All London seems going to the race. Dry goods clerks, licensed victualers, "cads," grocers, public-house keepers, bar-boys, stable-boys, bar-maids, servant-maids, well-to-do tradesmen and their wives and children, apothecaries' assistants, golden-haired milliners nicely gloved, dressmakers' apprentices, pickpockets, peers of the United Kingdom, University men in cap and gown, Charter House boys with yellow stockings on their legs, and dark-blue frocks fastened at their waists with leather straps, wandering Americans displaying large diamonds and shocking bad hats, Westminster schoolboys on the foundation of Elizabeth, the Dean of St. Paul's in his shovel hat, city men, brokers and bankers, watermen from the Thames, professional oarsmen, Jew and Gentile;—they are all interested and will all see the race or a part of it.
I never saw anything like this great crowd before. It is believed that two hundred and fifty thousand people is the average number that are in the habit of witnessing a Cambridge and Oxford boat-race, but Cambridge has been beaten so often that the interest does not compare at one of these races with the tumultuous, all-pervading feeling that is borne in every man's bosom as he hurries along to-day. It is not so very certain that Harvard will be beaten, although it is rumored here and there that Loring, the stroke of the crew, is unwell, which rumor only tends to increase the odds on Oxford.
The Temple Pier is reached at last. We pass through an arched gateway at the bottom of a narrow street opening on the Thames. This spot is more historic even than Westminster Abbey. There before us is the Church of the Temple, seven hundred years old and black with time. All the ground around us belonged, in the old bygone days, to the Knights of the Order of the Temple. Now the place is the resort of attorneys and barristers, and in it legal people have chambers. Right in the shadows of the old Norman towers and battlements of the ancient church, Jack Cade's followers rose from a swinish, drunken sleep to turn their weapons against each other, hundreds falling in the conflict.
DARK BLUE AND MAGENTA.
Here in these chambers resided Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Clarendon, Coke, Plowden, Selden, Beaumont, Congreve, Wycherley, Edmund Burke, Cowper, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Pope, Eldon, Erskine, and others equally famous. Here they slept, joked, read, ate, and drank. Surely, if this ground be not hallowed, none other is. In company with a well-known American journalist, Mr. George Wilkes, I find my way to the Press boat, which is lying at the foot of the Temple Pier, off the Embankment. She is a long, double-ender, with a red streak on the upper part of her keel, and a black hull. Her steam funnel is made to be lowered at the base, working on hinges, when going under a bridge. Like all Thames boats to-day, there are two flags hoisted on her twin flag-staffs—the American and English. There is no awning, no upper-deck, to shade us from the August sun, which is now beginning to burn with an intensity peculiarly un-English.
There are, perhaps, about fifty persons on the boat, of whom two-thirds are English; the remainder Americans. They are not all newspaper men, though it was understood, before the tickets were sold, that none but newspaper men would be allowed on board.
The Englishmen wear blue scarfs and bows; the Americans sport the magenta all over their clothes. The sun falls on the broad, muddy river in slanting beams of kindling gold, making the old warehouses on both banks of the stream, with their yellow brick gables, to stand out in bold relief.
Above us is London Bridge, lowering in its immensity, and to the right is Billingsgate Market and Paul's wharf. Close upon our stern is Blackfriars Bridge, the Temple Gardens, Kings College—a massive, dirty gray structure, running along the river bank; Somerset House, the government building where all the clerical work of the administration is done, and where well-fed and well-paid clerks enjoy sinecures of the kind which the Barnacle family were so fond of. Before us is Waterloo Bridge, Cecil, Duke, Salisbury, Surrey, Buckingham, Villiers, and other streets called after the mansions once inhabited by the favorites of Charles, James, and William of Blessed Memory.
At a little before two o'clock the Sunflower steams off on her journey up the river. The course of the steamer is impeded at almost every foot by small craft of all descriptions, en route to Putney and the race.