SWIMMERS AND SWIMMING.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VII, Issue 11, 12 January 1872, Page 4

SWIMMERS AND SWIMMING.

We all of us, or almost all of vs — for rheumatism has its victims — bathe; and yet how few of us swim, and how few of us bathe with comfort. Soon we shall be at the seaside, and there we shall — as a matter of course — court Father Ocean. Most of us like our matutinal dip, and even those who half dislike it feel it a duty to offer due sacrifice to the Genius loci. The breakers are rolling in over the shingle. A light breeze carries landward a fragrance of brine and iodine. The " crisping ripples on the beach, and tender curving lines of creamy spray" are invitingly cool; the thermometer, even in the shade, is at a figure unspeakable. And, although there may be no peace, and possibly no pleasure, " in ever climbing up the climbing wave," yet, to wrestle with the surf on a glorious summer morning, to stumble, and slip, and be tumbled over, and to be choked, and blinded, and buffetted by the surge, is — when all is said and done — one of the keenest of all mere animal delight, and one which almost tempts us to repeat the burden of the old song — "I never was on the dull tame shore, But I loved the great sea more and more." Cynical old gentlemen, whose bitter hatred and mistrust of water as an internal application is only to be equalled by their equally bitter mistrust and hatred of it as an external application, may grumble on at their pleasure, and decry the glorious appetite, and still more glorious sleep which follows a good dip. Little do they know of how much human nature there is in man, and how much pleasure there is in life; little do they reck " How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul, and the senses for everjn joy." The Athenians used to say of the comparatively few fools with whom they were blessed that they could " neither read nor swim." Of girls we are not for the moment speaking, though there is no good reason why they should not learn to swim. But we may surely agree with Plato, that if a lad cannot cross a river or bestride a horse, his education is incomplete. Swimming is, of all accomplishments, the one most easily picked up. A boy of average self-confidence learns to walk, and never forgets what he has once learned. And apart from the downright use of swimming — the power it gives us to save our lives and those of others — may we not say that it is par excellence the accomplishment of an Englishman ? We may never, in our allotted seventy years, have to swim for bare life, as did Rajah Brooke, Borneo's English king, when he crossed a broad ford, under a shower of poisoned arrows/, his sword between his teeth, and one hand holding his " Colt " high and dry ; we may never be called upon to jump from London-bridge, or to strike for the shore when a squall has taken aback and capsized the little ironballasted cockleshell. But, none the less, we are surely the better for being able to do these things, and for having gained an additional faculty — a faculty which enables us to laugh defiance at the ordinary river, and to feel with Byron that even the Hellespont itself is not so broad as it looks upon a map. — English Paper.