At last the dainty launch dashed up in front of the X—— College boat-house. Her engine was stopped, reversed, and she lay motionless beside the float. Then a slightly built figure in glittering uniform stepped from her and sauntered toward a group of the crew who were watching him curiously.
From them Ben Watkins, the captain, stepped forward, and to him the stranger handed a card bearing a gorgeous crest and the inscription “Lord Steerem, Brasscheek College, Oxford.”
Ben had read the morning Phonograph and knew this distinguished arrival was expected, but to have the honor of his first visit was almost too good to be true. It was overwhelming, and he hardly knew how to frame a proper speech of welcome.
“I am sure we are very glad to see you—that is, I mean you have done us a great honor, Mr.—I mean your lordship. Will you step up and look at our quarters?” he finally managed to say.
Ben Watkins was a splendid oarsman; nobody could deny that, but he was nothing of a society man, and to have a real live lord on his hands was almost too much for him.
“Aw, yes,” replied Lord Steerem, with a most affected drawl. “Don’t care if I do. Queer old crib of a place, though.”
“Yes, it is pretty bad,” Ben hastened to answer, though until that moment he had thought the X—— quarters about as comfortable as they could be made. “We have hard work to put up with them, and shall probably build a club-house of our own before next year. I suppose your quarters on the English Thames are very fine, Mr.—I mean Lord Steerem?”
“Aw, yes. Each crew there has a castle to itself, you know. But, I say,”—here his lordship carefully adjusted a single eye-glass, making an awful face in his efforts to keep it from dropping off—“what a beastly queer go that is, don’t you know!”
He had stopped and was staring at the notice over the front gate.
“You don’t mean to tell me that those cads from the noospapers actually try to force their way in here?”