of the average freshmen during the first few days of his rowing career. The majority of men who get into a boat for the first time in their lives seem to imagine that it is necessary to twist their bodies into the most uncomfortable and unnatural it positions, and is hard at first to persuade them that the movements of a really good oar are easy, natural, and even graceful. It is not long, however, as a rule, before a considerable improvement becomes manifest, and, at the end of the first fortnight or so of the term, most of the novices have begun to get a grasp of the first principles of the art.
About the end of the second week of the term the freshmen are picked up into Fours. These crews, which row in heavy tub-boats, practise for about three weeks for a race, which is rowed during the fifth or sixth week of the term. After a day or two of rest, the best men from these Fours are taken out in eights. No one who has not rowed in an eight with a crew composed almost entirely of beginners can imagine the discomfort, I might almost say the agony, of these first two or three rows. One of the chief causes of this is that the boats used on such occasions
are usually, from motives of economy, very old ones, the riggers being often twisted and bent by the crabs of former generations, and the boats themselves heavy and inclined to be waterlogged.
During the last day or two of the term, the captain, with a view to making up his Torpids for the next term, generally tries to arrange one or two crews selected from the best of the freshmen and such of the old hands as are available; and justly proud is a freshman if, having got into a boat for the first time at the beginning of the term, he finds himself among the select few for the first Torpid at the end of it.
At the beginning of the Lent Term the energies of the college boat clubs are entirely devoted to the selection and preparation of the crews for the Torpids. The smaller colleges have one crew and the larger ones two, and in some cases three, crews each. No one who has rowed in his college Eight in the races of the previous summer is permitted to row in the Torpid, so the crews are generally composed partly of men who rowed in the Torpid of the preceding year, but who were not quite good enough to get into the Eight, and partly of freshmen; the boats used must
be clinker built of five streaks, with a minimum beam measurement of 2 ft. 2 in. measured inside, and with fixed seats.
Although I do not propose here to say anything about the general subject of training, I cannot refrain from making one remark. It is in practising for the Torpids that freshmen generally get their first experience of strict training, and for this reason there is no crew more difficult to train than a Torpid. Most of the men after their first experience of regular work have fine healthy appetites, and, as a rule, eat about twice as much as is good for them, with the result that, even if they escape violent indigestion, they are painfully short-winded, and find the greatest difficulty in rowing a fast stroke. The Torpids train for about three weeks before the races, which take place at the end of the fourth and the fifth weeks in term. They last for six nights, and are bumping races, the boats starting 160 ft. apart. A hundred and sixty feet is a very considerable distance to make up in about three quarters of a mile, and at the head of a division a crew must be about fifteen seconds faster over the course to make certain of a bump.
Of performances in the Torpids that of Brasenose stands by itself. They finished at the head of the river in 1885, and remained there for eleven years, until they were displaced by New College in 1896.
The only other race in the Lent Term is the Clinker Fours. This race is rowed in sliding-seat clinker-built boats, and the crews consist of men who have not rowed in the Trial Eights or in the first division of the Eights in the previous Summer Term. For some occult reason there is never a large entry for the Clinker Fours, although the race affords an excellent opportunity of seeing how the best of the Torpid men row on slides, and should thus be a great help to the captain of a college boat club in making up his Eight for the next term. With so small an entry for the Clinker Fours, most of the college captains devote their time after the Torpids, for the rest of the term, to coaching their men in sliding-seat tubs, the time at the beginning of the Summer Term being so short that it is absolutely necessary to get the men who have been rowing on fixed seats in the Torpids thoroughly accustomed to slides by the end of the Lent Term,