Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 272, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 November 1918 — On the Placid Thames [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

On the Placid Thames

ON 'A QUIET reach of the Thames my friend’s houseboat is tethered to two posts —as if it neve? meant to go away, Fullerton J. Waldo” writes from London io the Philadelphia Ledger. Just above ihe mooring place the old, gnarled Charon who for a penny plies his trade lias dug up ancient British poetry and Roman spearheads in the mud. But we did not now require his professional service, for across the river to meet us came like a. shaft of light his amateur rival. (“Rival,” of course, if you run the word back to its origin, means one who dwells on the bank of a stream.) She was a girl with hair of burnished gold bobbed and filleted, who bent mahwise to the oars, in her yellow sweater and white skirt, a naiad of the rushes who seemed to have risen out of the stream, its own authentic spirit. The houseboat itself, white-painted, held aloft under its striped canopy and ever soft red rugs, a hanging garden of geranium baskets, with vines whose tendrils delicately wavered on the soft whisper of the breeze. A clutter of canoes and punts gently fretted the /floating platform below, as though .upon a river Of Cathay. In the I’vlng tooiji, radiant with violas And roses and geraniums, the filmy snow of the curtains was parted by a fireplace and over it a clock-restored the sense of time that elsewhere was pleasantly absent or negligible. . _ Met a Flying Man. ; Two railed gangways led ashore—and no sooner had I put my modest luggage aboard than to the_ shore we went, to find golf links close at hand, where the frit sheep grazed. A young and debonair Englishman met its there, and I learned to my surprise that be was accidental. He was a flying man, and something wrong with the engine compelled him to volplane (down to a paddock next thd~golf course. “’Tis an ill wind that has 'blown me good,” I thought, as I shook bands with this Brushwood boy angel unawares. The larks were singing, and I paused often with cleek or lofter in midair to hear the sound. I think-1 care more for George Meredith’s “Lark Ascending” than I do for Shelley’s “unpremeditated’,’ singer, but if I had to choose between them I would take them both. Such overflowing billfuls of ecstasy, from such a little bird! And he presently went off- (it seemed) in company with a disreputable troupe of sparrowhawks, singing to them still, as an opera tenor might chant for a company of songless tramps. Can it be that an English links, with Paul Potter cattle and Daubigny pools and willows round gbout, ever hears a harsh word over a golf ball sliced or stymied or in obstinate hiding? Above us airplanes purred and were vigilant unceasingly. And in my heart I blessed them, and with my hand I waved them greetings that I hope they saw. In a single group on the way to the links I had beheld seven captive "sausage” balloons—as though a benevolent constitutional monarchy had sent all these things that a plain American might have aii afternoon of sport. What close neighbors are the Implements of war and of peace in the old world today 1 ' u , • i We-walked back >to the boat, through a sgarden plot brimming with blue violas, and there was a tiny cemeterf with more violas in a glass oh the grave of a cygnet born the day before. Mother Bird Had Done Murder. - Then we met the mother bird, the murderess. In stately clrdes she swimming* round the boat, a swan more lovely to look upon than any that bore Lohengrin and heard his tributary song. ’ \ ; The day before four cygnets were hatched out. Three of them were with fcer^nov?—-the fourth, she had decided, with an unruffled calm I- doubt not, was one too many. So she had slain it. tranquilly, enough the bereaved family was taking its outing—-so sogn after the funeral! Father was the advance guard, Ilk* a cruiser bringing In a transport ship and lesser ’ craft Two gray fluff balls were on the mother’s back, In a warm cradle deep and soft between her wings. They arched and stretched their necks is they saw her doing, and took In all the view, and peered over the side with a remarkable air of detachment at their small ther paddling desperately to keep up

with the procession, with his/day-old wings and feet like those of the Platypus that you may see in a Strand window devoted to New South Wales. Father did more than circle about and pride himself. When the young and foolish dog attached —If one may say so—to the boat started to swim the river to look for rats a-plenty in the farther bank, the male swan would steer down upon his snuffling bead as ruthlessly as Horatio Lord Nelson on the track of a French frigate, and If a rescue party did not at once pole shoutingly to his salvation, in a punt it went hard with the furred swimmer in battle with the feathered, who from his superior height, had something of the. advantage z>f mounted policemen over a pedestrian. Antics of Water Babies. Suddenly Mother Swan swished her head about and said something in a hissing dhdertone to the indiscernible (■ar of one of the’ gray fluffs —for out it sprawled from its snug shelter and into the darkling Thames it tumbled on its back. Quick as a midge it righted Itself. Here was ’a fine chance for little paddllfig brother to get aboard —-but Ulas! though he could swim better than the sturdy British schoolboys round the bend, he could not climb, and so he cuddled in the lee of his mother like a tug that noses a lordly ocean liner. In the performance of these darling little web-footed water babies using their mother for an excursion steamer ■as audaciously as a land baby tides “pick-a-back” in she nursery, there, was a ludicrous resemblance to the holiday trippers who were overcrowding the small but ambitions river steamers from lock to lock. But the swafi’s babies, trying to make a neck like mother’s were undulant as serpents and restless as weathercocks, in their curiosity, whereas ’Arry and ’Arriet often sat with their backs to the river oblivious to everything but love’s young dreams. As the rose flush of the sky paled to lime yellow on the way to the few - short hours of night the family sat down to dinner, and there the cook, a dignified parishioner, had fixed for me—the gentleman from America —a great bowl of geranium petals, blue flowers and white carnations. “Are you sure,” she had asked her mistress anxiously, "that these 'are just the colors of his country? I would like sb much to please him; You see we owe so much to America 1”

A Quiet Reach of the Thames.