The grips of guide-boat oars overlap. And your hands follow rather than accompany each other from catch to finish, and from finish to catch. If you are careless, or not to the stroke born or trained, you occasionally knock little chunks of skin and flesh from your knuckles.
Herring watched Phyllis's gentle and restrained efforts with inscrutable eyes.
"I never could understand," he said, "how you fellows manage to row at all with that sort of an outfit. At Harvard they only give you one oar and let you take both hands to it, and then you can't row. At least, I couldn't. They put me right out of the boat. They said I caught crabs. As a matter of fact, I didn't. All I did was to sit there, and every now and then the handle of my oar banged me across the solar plexus."
"We're not going far, you know," said Phyllis (and she mastered the desire to laugh). "Hadn't you—ah—um—better put your rod together?"
"Oh, I can do that!" said Herring. "You begin with the big piece and you stick the next-sized piece into that, and so on. And I know how to put the reel on, because the man in the store showed me, and I know how to run the line through the rings."
"Well," said Phyllis, "that's more than half the battle."
"And," Herring continued, "he showed me how to tie on the what-you-may-call-it and the flies."
"Good!" said Phyllis.
"And, of course," he concluded, "I've forgotten."
Now, Phyllis had been shown how to tie flies to a leader only the night before, and she, also, had forgotten.