COLLEGE ROWING AT CAMBRIDGE.
The casual visitor would scarcely imagine that Cambridge resembled either Macedon or Monmouth in the possession of a river. He sees in The Backs what looks rather like a huge moat, designed to keep marauders from the sacred college courts, and filled with discoloured water, destitute seemingly of all stream. This he knows cannot be the racing river. The innumerable bridges forbid the notion, although Ouida has, in one of her novels, sprinkled it with a mixture of racing Eights and water-lilies. He wanders on from college to college, and nowhere does he come across the slightest sign of the river of which he has heard so much. Indeed, a man may stroll on Midsummer Common within about a hundred yards of the boat-houses without suspecting the existence of the Cam. I can well remember convoying to the river an enthusiastic freshman who had just joined his college boat club. At every step I was asked whether we were yet approaching the noble stream. I answered evasively, and with an air of mystery which befits a third-year man in the presence of freshmen. At length we turned on to the common, which is bounded by the Cam ; on the further bank stand the boat-houses. There were crowds of men busy in the yards, there were coaches riding on the nearer bank, but of the river itself there was no indication. We were still about two hundred yards away when a Lady Margaret Eight passed, the heads of the crew in their scarlet caps being just visible above the river-bank as they swung backwards and forwards in their boat. I felt my freshman's grip tightening on my arm. Suddenly he stood stock still and rubbed his eyes. " Good heavens I" he said in an awestruck voice, "what on earth are those little red animals I see running up and down there? Funniest thing I ever saw." I reassured him, and in a few moments more we arrived at the Cam, crossed it in a "grind," and solved the puzzle. Distance, therefore, can scarcely be said to lend enchantment to the view, since at anything over one hundred yards it withdraws the Cam altogether from our sight. It is not easy,
indeed, to see where the attractions of the Cam come in. It has been called with perfect justice a ditch, a canal, and a sewer, but not even the wildest enthusiasm would have supposed it to be a running stream, or ventured at first sight to call it a river. Yet this slow and muddy thread of water has been for more than seventy years the scene of excitements and triumphs and glories without end. Upon its shallow stream future judges and bishops and Parliament-men—not to speak of the great host of minor celebrities and the vaster army of future obscurities—have sought exercise and relaxation ; to its unsightly banks their memory still fondly turns wherever their lot may chance to be cast, and still some thousand of the flower of our youth find health and strength in driving the labouring Eights and Fours along its narrow reaches and round its winding corners. It may well excite the wonder of the uninitiated that, with so many natural disadvantages to contend against, the oarsmen of Cambridge should have been able during all these years to main tain so high a standard of oarsmanship. Time after time since the year when First Trinity secured the first race for the Grand Challenge have her college crews carried off the chief prizes at Henley against all competitors, until, in 1887, Trinity Hall swept the board by actually winning five out of the eight Henley races, other Cambridge men accounting for the remaining three. The record of Cambridge rowing is thus a very proud one ; but those who know the Cambridge oarsman and his river will find no difficulty in accounting for it. The very disadvantages of the Cam all tend to imbue the man who rows upon it with a stern sense of duty, with the feeling that it is business and not pleasure, hard work and not a picnic, that summon him every day of the term to the boat-houses and urge him on his way to Baitsbite. We are forced to do without the natural charms that make the Isis beautiful. We console our selves by a strict devotion to the labour of the oar.