The Testing Testing 1st,

Testing 1,000.

Welcome back, everyone to 1001 Stories for the Road.

I have a surprise for you today.

I don't ordinarily do this, but I am condensing this story,

and we are moving straight to chapter 19, which is the final chapter of the book. And we start a

brand new story next week Sunday. In this chapter, we're going to give the dog, Montmorency,

a chance to enjoy himself in Oxford. And now our story.

We spent two very pleasant days at Oxford. There are plenty of dogs in the town of Oxford.

Montmorency had 11 fights on the first day and 14 on the second, and evidently thought he had got to

heaven.

Among folk too constitutionally weak, or too constitutionally lazy,

whichever it may be, to relish upstream work,

it is a common practice to get a boat at Oxford and row down.

For the energetic, however, the upstream journey is certainly to be preferred.

It does not seem good to be always going with the current.

There is more satisfaction in squaring one's back and fighting against it and winning one's way forward in spite of it, at least so I feel, when Harris and George are sculling and I am steering. To those who do contemplate making

Oxford their starting place, I would say take your own boat, unless, of course, you could take

someone else's without any possible danger of being found out. The boats that, as a rule,

are left for hire on the Thames above Marlowlow are very good boats. They are fairly watertight,

and so long as they are handled with care, they rarely come to pieces or sink. There are

places in them to sit down on, and they are complete with all the necessary arrangements,

...