Sporting notions of present days and past

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192 SPORTING NOTIONS
or the other. First I was staggered almost at
the jubilee part of the business—tilted off my
balance first one way and then the other. Fifty
years — from 1856 to 1906—seemed such a
tremendously long while. The club's seeing
fifty years, with self and contemporaries carrying
remembrance of many of the original members,
though not privileged to see them all row,
sounded impossible, too. Again, turning the
situation over as one does, you began to believe
in these fighting men's days having belonged to
a previous era altogether. Surely great oarsmen
and scullers, whom boat-pulling-inclined youths
worshipped in the sixties—very grown-up youths
now, these latter,in the aged list—must have been
at work for the L. R. C. earlier than 1856! Why,
they were middle-aged men already to the lot
coming on to succeed them.
So they were, but what sixteen or seventeen
or up to very nearly twenty considers old may be
scarcely deemed a properly grown-up stage by
the man of forty. I know that H. H. Playford
and Frank L. Playford seemed to me quite
patriarchal when I was not so old as I am now,
but then, John Ireland, the great umpire in
professional matches, and I were almost of an age
in company. These left off making history before
my contemporaries were grown-up enough to go
in for man's sports; but between their near
successors and our crop was no difference, not
any in some instances, and that takes you back
to, well—quite long enough to go. Mr Horton,
in a very interesting reminiscent speech, among
many cited mentioned comrades, great amateur
rowers whose loss the club deplores, grudging
their being called even if Nature's course was run