Sporting notions of present days and past

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188 SPORTING NOTIONS
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often wonder that demand is small for materials,
sketches of sorts to conjure up past times and
their pastimes, as could be done with, say, Mr
Eyre's suggested series of old sporting drums'
history. Take, for instance, the waterside pubs.,
where men who rowed, their gaffers, trainers, and
others in the fancy line did congregate. Old hands
who have been out of England for a long spell feel
quite pangs on viewing Putney as it is when
unthinkingly expecting to find the Putney as
it was in their long-ago days ; upset in all their
notions as a long-absent traveller, returning
a man to the homestead he left while a boy,
and dead out in all his measurements and
estimates.
From those with loving remembrance of the
metropolitan waters and their banks as they were
before the great reconstruction set in, I should like
to hear an opinion. For prettiness and enjoyment,
old Putney—and I am not speaking of so very long
ago—was tons in front of the new. Above the
wooden bridge was country, and nicely wooded,
too, on the Fulham side, before the Conservancy
had the trees by the Bishop's Walk cut down.
Up to very nearly 1870 waterside Putney was
pretty much as are villages remote, right away on
the higher reaches, where the houseboat is absent
and the banjo bungalow has not come. Pictur-
esqueness there was in plenty when the big trees
stood on the Bishop's Walk over against Fulham
Palace; the clubs had not a house, not even
London; Beverley Brook's outlet at high tide
made as pretty a peep of romantic scenery as you
could wish for, quite to suit Mr Waterfall Smith;
Craven Cottage had not begun, like Sweet Alice's
(Mrs Ben Bolt that ought to have been) rustic