1. I was one of a party who hired an up-river boat one summer, for a few days‘ trip. We had none of us ever seen the hired up-ri
ver boat before; and we did not know what it was when we did see it. We had written for a boat – a double sculling skiff; and when we went down with our bags to the yard, and gave our names, the man said, ―Oh, yes; you‘re the party that wrote for a double sculling skiff. It‘s all right. Jim, fetch round THE PRIDE OF THE THAMES. 2. The boy went, and re-appeared five minutes afterwards, struggling with an antediluvian chunk of wood, that looked as though it had been recently dug out of somewhere, and dug out carelessly, so as to have been unnecessarily damaged in the process. My own idea, on first catching sight of the object, was that it was a Roman relic of some sort, – relic of WHAT I do not know, possibly of a coffin. 3. The neighbourhood of the upper Thames is rich in Roman relics, and my surmise seemed to me a very probable one; but our serious young man, who is a bit of a geologist, pooh-poohed my Roman relic theory, and said it was clear to the meanest intellect (in which category he seemed to be grieved that he could not conscientiously include mine) that the thing the boy had found was the fossil of a whale; and he pointed out to us various evidences proving that it must have belonged to the preglacial period. 4. To settle the dispute, we appealed to the boy. We told him not to be afraid, but to speak the plain truth: Was it the fossil of a pre-Adamite whale, or was it an early Roman coffin? The boy said it was THE PRIDE OF THE THAMES. We thought this a very humorous answer on the part of the boy at first, and somebody gave him two pence as a reward for his ready wit; but when he persisted in keeping up the joke, as we thought, too long, we got vexed with him. ―Come, come, my lad! said our captain sharply, ―Don‘t let us have any nonsense. You take your mother‘s washing-tub home again, and bring us a boat. 5. The boat-builder himself came up then, and assured us, on his word, as a practical man, that the thing really was a boat – was, in fact, THE boat, the ―double sculling skiff selected to take us on our trip down the river. We grumbled a good deal. We thought he might, at least, have had it whitewashed or tarred – had SOMETHING done to it to distinguish it from a bit of a wreck; but he could not see any fault in it. 6. He even seemed offended at our remarks. He said he had picked us out the best boat in all his stock, and he thought we might have been more grateful. He said it, THE PRIDE OF THE THAMES, had been in use, just as it now stood (or rather as it now hung together), for the last forty years, to his knowledge, and nobody had complained of it before, and he did not see why we should be the first to begin. 7. We argued no more. We fastened the so-called boat together with some pieces of string, got a bit of wall-paper and pasted over the shabbier places, said our prayers, and stepped on board. They charged us thirty-five shillings for the loan of the remnant for six days; and we could have bought the thing out-and-out for four-and- sixpence at any sale of drift-wood round the coast.
4. ―We argued no more‖ (Para 7). The author makes this comment because:
(a) they believed The pride of the Thames was indeed a double sculling skiff
(b) they realised that it was no use arguing with the boat owner
(c) the boat owner threatened that he would not rent out the boat to them
(d) the boat owner had agreed to carry out necessary repairs to the best
5. Before starting out on their journey the author and his friends said a prayer. Which of the following
(a) they expected the river to be in high tide
(b) they would have to pay heavy damages if they lost the boat
(c) they were all very superstitious
(d) they were afraid that the boat will break up and sink in the river
