Sporting notions of present days and past

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184 SPORTING NOTIONS
accounts of celebrated sporting drums, disappeared
or disestablished from their former association.
If only we could find the right man to carry out
this work! Unfortunately, you know, such
centres began to fade a long while ago, and a
good many who talk about them do so only at
second hand.
Two or three times I have started to do a
sort of Old and New London style of go-as-you-
please descriptive history of both sides of the
boat-racing Thames, mixing matter understanded
of the people generally with special diversions in
the direction of sport, present and past, its
worthies, unworthies, celebrities, and notorieties,
their tricks, manners, good or bad luck, characters,
and—what is a handy opposite to the compli-
mentary reading of character ? shall we say
convictions ? No more congenial work than this
did I ever find. Anything to do with sport was
good enough for me. Boat-racing, the principal
pastime of our river, I liked as much as pretty
nearly any three other amusements outside it put
together. Besides, I knew through personal
acquaintance such a lot of the old stock, the
crop just before that which at the time of my
peregrinations held the sway, as they themselves
would have put it, and the young 'uns coming on.
Mind you, putting us both to start off the same
mark, Mr Eyre could give me I do not know how
many lengths, and a dreadful beating as historian
of boat-racing on the river, he being as chock-full
of knowledge as Sol Gills, with an encyclopaedic
—may I say omnivorous ?—appetite for major
facts and the most minute detail, possessing
the advantage of living and having his being
among the aquatically-inclined Thames-siders.