There are a certain number of riverside roughs
who make quite an income, during the summer, by slouching about the banks
and blackmailing weak-minded noodles in this way. They represent
themselves as sent by the proprietor. The proper course to pursue is to
offer your name and address, and leave the owner, if he really has
anything to do with the matter, to summon you, and prove what damage you
have done to his land by sitting down on a bit of it. But the majority
of people are so intensely lazy and timid, that they prefer to encourage
the imposition by giving in to it rather than put an end to it by the
exertion of a little firmness.
Where it is really the owners that are to blame, they ought to be shown
up. The selfishness of the riparian proprietor grows with every year.
If these men had their way they would close the river Thames altogether.
They actually do this along the minor tributary streams and in the
backwaters. They drive posts into the bed of the stream, and draw chains
across from bank to bank, and nail huge notice-boards on every tree. The
sight of those notice-boards rouses every evil instinct in my nature. I
feel I want to tear each one down, and hammer it over the head of the man
who put it up, until I have killed him, and then I would bury him, and
put the board up over the grave as a tombstone.
I mentioned these feelings of mine to Harris, and he said he had them
worse than that. He said he not only felt he wanted to kill the man who
caused the board to be put up, but that he should like to slaughter the
whole of his family and all his friends and relations, and then burn down
his house. This seemed to me to be going too far, and I said so to
Harris; but he answered:
"Not a bit of it. Serve `em all jolly well right, and I'd go and sing
comic songs on the ruins."
I was vexed to hear Harris go on in this blood-thirsty strain. We never
ought to allow our instincts of justice to degenerate into mere
vindictiveness. It was a long while before I could get Harris to take a
more Christian view of the subject, but I succeeded at last, and he
promised me that he would spare the friends and relations at all events,
and would not sing comic songs on the ruins.
You have never heard Harris sing a comic song, or you would understand
the service I had rendered to mankind.
