One or two real Venetian gondolas are kept at that river-reach where we spent our summer. The owner of the principal one is an English nobleman who lived long in Italy and whose twelve daughters were born there. It is a sight to see those twelve beautiful sisters, from six years of age to twenty-four, poled down the river to church every Sunday morning by a swarthy and veritable Venetian gondolier. Whether or not that hearse-like craft has sacred associations in the minds of the twelve maidens all in a row, or whether its grimness and want of swiftness seem out of place amid the carnival brilliancy of Sunday afternoon, it is certain that it is never used except for church-going, and the maidens appear later in the day each in her own swift little canoe, or two or three sisters together in a larger one, darting to and fro, hither and yon, with almost incredible swiftness, almost more like winged thoughts than like even swallows on the wing. The gabled and ivy-wreathed Elizabethan manor-house which is the summer home of the maidens stands but a few rods from the river's bank. Here, amidst decorous shrubbery, upon smooth shaven and rolled turf, where marble vases overflow with gorgeous flowers, sit Pater and Mater among their dozens of guests. Some of the gentlemen are in correct morning dress, some in boating-costumes, and some in that last stage of unclothedness or first of clothedness which is the English bathing-dress. In their striped tights on land these last look exactly like saw-dust and rope ring clowns, but when they dive into the water from that well-bred lawn and dart in wild pursuit of the maidens, who beat them off with oars from climbing into the canoes, amid shouts of aquatic and terrestrial laughter, one would almost swear they were neither the clowns they looked a moment ago, nor yet the English gentlemen they really are, but fantastic mermen bent upon carrying earth-brides back with them into their cool native depths beneath the bright water.
That is what it looks like. But a single glimpse into those cool dappled depths, where the sunny water is shoal enough to show bottom, reveals, alas! how little mermaiden and romantic those depths are. For London does not disport itself every Sunday on the Thames without leaving ample traces of that disporting. We see those traces gleaming and glooming there,—empty beer- and wine-bottles, devitalized sardine-boxes, osseous remains of fish, flesh, and fowl, scooped cheese-rinds, egg-shells, the buttons of defrauded raiment, and the parted rims of much-snatched-at and vigorously-squabbled-for straw hats.
A favorite boating-trip is from Teddington up to Oxford, or vice versa, spending a week or two on the way, and stopping at river-side inns at night. In the season these inns are full to overflowing, and the roughest and smallest of water-side hamlets holds its accommodations at lofty premiums. A number of public pleasure-steamers and many private steam-launches ply up and down, making the whole trip in two or three days, drawing up at night at towns, and by day provoking curses both loud and deep by the swash of their tidal waves against the liliputian navy. Many of the merry boating-parties of men and women seek only sleeping-accommodations at the inns, and do their own cooking upon bosky islands, on the wooded or sunny banks of the river, by means of kerosene- or charcoal-stoves and tiny tents. How appetizingly we have thus smelt the broiling steak and grilled chop done to a turn even in a camp frying-pan, as we tramped along the river heights and looked down upon chatting groups below! How like airs of Araby the Blest the odors of steaming coffee! how more stimulating than breath of fair Spice Isles the pungent incense of hissing onions!
As a consequence of this return of Nature's children to Nature's breast, the genii loci, the sylvan sprites, are all frightened inland from the borders of the beautiful river. Except here and there where huge boards threaten trespassers and announce that landing is forbidden upon this Private Property, wild flowers will not grow, the grass looks trampled and dim, the soft summer zephyrs play among empty paper bags and relics of grocers' parcels, with sound and sentiment vastly unlike their natural music among green, waving leaves. The river is spoiled for the poet and the dreamer, and even the artist must choose his bits with care. Hyde Park and Piccadilly have come up to the Thames; and what does Hyde Park care for the poetry of dreaming nature, or what the river-madmen for aught else than glorious expansion of muscle and strengthening of sinew and the godlike sense of largeness and lightness which comes with that strengthening and expanding?
Gliding up and down the river, one would suppose all London had taken to boats. But we as trampists came to other conclusions as we pegged along the white Berkshire highways, smooth and even as parquetted floors, day after day. There the bicycle holds its own, and more too, being largely adopted not only by genuine 'cyclists, but by others as well whose only interest is to cover the ground as quickly as possible,—amateur photographers lashed all over with apparatus, artists shapelessly ditto, and pastoral postmen square-backed with letter-pouches. Women tricyclists are only less numerous, and the dignity and modesty must be crude indeed that find objections to this manner of feminine peregrination. The costume is simple and plain,—close-fitting upper garments, without fuss of furbelow, and plain close skirts, met at the ankles by high buttoned boots. A lady's seat upon a tricycle is far less conspicuous than upon a horse, her bodily motion is less, and the movement of her feet scarcely more than is necessary to run a sewing-machine. She sits at her ease in a perfectly lady-like manner, and flies over the ground like a courser of the desert, if she pleases, or rolls quietly and smoothly along, chatting easily with the pedestrians who amble at her side.
Lady tricyclists attract no attention whatever in Oxford Street. Imagine one flying down Broadway!
As trampists our femininely-encumbered party in those delicious English days considered fourteen quotidian miles not discreditable to us, particularly when taking into consideration the bleats and baas and whimpering laggardness with which we returned from three-mile excursions during the first few days we were in the tramping-line. By degrees we thus explored the whole country within a radius of seven miles of Ethel. With this we were content, yea, even proud; for did not many of our boating women-neighbors grumble even at their walk to the river and declare they would rather row five miles than walk one? We were proud, for we knew every church, every picturesque cottage and ruin, within our radius, while our aquatic friends knew only those bordering the river. We were proud—until, ah me! until that desolate day when a merrily, merrily flying squad swooped down upon us and declared they had 'cycled every inch of the twenty-mile periphery of which Ethel's neighboring church tower was the centre!
That cutting down of our pedal pride resulted in our subscribing to a daily paper. Every morning before stretching out to our regular day's tramp we had been wont to trot through dewy lanes, over stiles, and across subtly-colored turnip- and cabbage-fields, to purchase in the town of M—— a luxury not to be had in our own hamlet,—the "Daily News." Rain or shine, that trot must be trotted, for there were those among us who would have tramped sulkily all day and sniffed the sniff of wrath at ivied church and thatched cottage were the acid of their natures not made frothy and light by the alkali of their morning paper. It had never occurred to us, not even when we camped beneath wayside shade around our sandwiches and ale or in some stiff and dim inn-parlor and listened to the reading of the "News," that in reality the town of M——, and not the brickhood of Ethel, was thus the centre of all our ambulatory circumferences. It had never before dawned upon us that we thus added three uncounted miles to our fourteen diurnally counted ones. What astonishment at our own pedometric weakness of calculation! What disgust to find our periphery thus three whole miles smaller than it need have been!
The next day we subscribed to the "News," and walked nine miles as the bee flies from the front door of Ethel even unto the ruins of Medmenham. And we vowed by all our plaster gods and painted goddesses that another summer we would tramp no more. We would 'cycle.
A mile away from Ethel is the village proper of Cookham. It is a sleepy town, save in the boating-season; and whoever enters the post-office in any season finds it empty and inhospitable. Raps upon a tightly-closed inner door call a woman attendant from rattling sewing or noisy gossip of the invisible penetralia; and as soon as the business is done the inhospitable door swings shut again in the stranger's face.