Three Men in a Boat

by Jerome K. Jerome

It cast a gloom over the boat, there being no mustard. We ate our beef in silence. Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting. We thought of the happy days of childhood, and sighed.

as a rule on the river, the wind is always dead against you whatever way you go.

This evening, however, they had evidently made a mistake, and had put the wind round at our back instead of in our face.

There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet—except in dreams.

they cursed us—not with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with us—good, substantial curses.

The only subject on which Montmorency and I have any serious difference of opinion is cats.

What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over.

George thought the music might do him good—said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like. Harris said he would rather have the headache.

“What’s he want to howl like that for when I’m playing?” George would exclaim indignantly, while taking aim at him with a boot. “What do you want to play like that for when he is howling?”

George suggested walking back to Henley and assaulting a policeman, and so getting a night’s lodging in the station-house.

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.

In a boat, I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea of each member of the crew that he is doing everything.

There was a time, long ago, when I used to clamour for the hard work: now I like to give the youngsters a chance.

We gave him all the regular ones—the time-honoured lies that have done duty up the river with every boating-man for years past—and added seven entirely original ones that we had invented for ourselves, including a really quite likely story, founded, to a certain extent, on an all but true episode, which had actually happened in a modified degree some years ago to friends of ours—a story that a mere child could have believed without injuring itself, much.

He says he’ll teach you to take his boards and make a raft of them; but, seeing that you know how to do this pretty well already, the offer, though doubtless kindly meant, seems a superfluous one on his part, and you are reluctant to put him to any trouble by accepting it.

It was not till I came to the Thames that I got style.

I like to watch an old boatman rowing, especially one who has been hired by the hour. There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his method. It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life.

By a sort of natural instinct, we, of course, eventually decided that the bottom was the top, and set to work to fix it upside-down.

The boat may possibly have come to the conclusion, judging from a cursory view of our behaviour, that we had come out for a morning’s suicide, and had thereupon determined to disappoint us. That is the only suggestion I can offer.

But we learned experience, and they say that is always cheap at any price.

It must have been worth while having a mere ordinary plague now and then in London to get rid of both the lawyers and the Parliament.

That trout was plaster-of-Paris.

The heroine of a modern novel is always “divinely tall,” and she is ever “drawing herself up to her full height.” At the “Barley Mow” she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.

It is surprising how early one can get up, when camping out.

The pool under Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a very good place to drown yourself in.

Little mishaps, that you would hardly notice on dry land, drive you nearly frantic with rage, when they occur on the water.

When another boat gets in my way, I feel I want to take an oar and kill all the people in it.

I would say, take your own boat—unless, of course, you can take someone else’s without any possible danger of being found out.

Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature.

This naturally led to some pleasant chat about sciatica, fevers, chills, lung diseases, and bronchitis;

we went to bed—that is, we undressed ourselves, and tossed about at the bottom of the boat for some three or four hours.

After that we could walk about the village in the pouring rain until bed-time; or we could sit in a dimly-lit bar-parlour and read the almanac.

“With a little supper at the—2 to follow,” I added, half unconsciously.