SHOWING THEM THE WAY.

Globe, Volume VI, Issue 653, 22 July 1876, Page 3

SHOWING THEM THE WAY.

(Banbury News.) He was a short man, with 'a bouquet in his button-hole ; and looking off on the lake where a dozen or so boats were skimming the waters under the skilled strokes of the oarsmen, he said to himself: “ I’ll go off and show these fellows how it is done. I have never been in a boat, to be sure, but it’s just as e-a e-y. They say it takes practice. Nonsense 1 takes your granny 1 _lt takes common sense ; any man, not an idiot, can row.” After relieving his mind in this manner, he went down to the boat-house, paid 25 cents, and, settling his hat over his larboard ear, stepped into the boat, and commenced to ship the oars—thinking all the time how he would make the boat travel like a thing of life over the water. Then he .squared himself for the first stroke. He imagined himself at the stroke oar of the Cornell boat; and it would come into his mind that, if he had been there, they would have laid out Harvard for at least another length. He caught himself looking round to see if the Danbury News man was on the shore lying in wait for him, with a tape, to find the length of his arm, size of his muscle, &c. He calculated to row about forty strokes to the minute, to be increased to seventy-five on a spurt, if required. It was a beautiful picture. The placid waters of the lake, reflecting the blue sky and fleecy clouds above, the fleet keels cutting the water in every direction, made the scene inspiring to to the last degree, and as his poetic eye took in the surrounding objects, his heart fairly thrilled with triumphant expectation. Then he reached well forward and made a desperate grab at the water, caught it the whole length of one oar, while the other described an arc through the immensity of space ; then two very stumpy lego stood straight up in the air, and the rest of that man went into the bottom of the boat, and got tangled up with the warp and rusty bailer. Then he swore, and thumped himseif with (he ends of the oars, and barked the skin off generally, and finally got up and paddled to the shore, with the crown out of his hat, the reef band jerked out of his pants, his bouquet ripped up by the roots, and his moral character stranded to a ropsyarn. Then he got out and walked off, with the remark that some people might see fun in such cussed tomfoolery, but ho couldn’t. Ilia arm was not measured.