Word: starting
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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WORDSWORTH.AUGUST 24, 1873. - Started at 9 A. M. Meant to start at 4. Companion, - athletic Freshman. Equipment, - old hats, flannel shirts, double-decked boots, six-foot staves, knapsacks (twenty pounds each), one saucepan, and two tin cups. (We had a little brandy, three pints.) Destination, - unknown. Walked twenty miles before dinner. Weather rather debilitating. Took a little brandy. At 12 M. saw pretty girl blowing dinner-horn at door of farm-house. Stopped for dinner. Dinner bad. Girl pleasant. Freshman asked for lock of her hair. Started again at 1.30. Walked twenty miles. Startled female peasant takes us for brigands...
...London there is a course perfectly straight, according to the United States chart, for six miles, and for four miles with no part narrower than thirteen hundred feet, which is very nearly half as broad again as the start at Springfield. Also, there are no shoal places on the New London course. The banks are steep, so that the steamers go close to either shore, and the current is unusually even in all parts. As for convenience to spectators, the course ends within five minutes' walk from the city. Besides the Norwich and New London lines of steamers...
...with, were it not for the fact that it is generally considered necessary in boat-races to have water to row on. There is, to be sure, some water in the Connecticut, but not enough. Nearly in the middle of the course, and about a mile from the start the bottom showed itself last year, and yet last year was not unusually dry. This was in the direct course of the boats, and although no boat actually ran into it during the race, yet some boats had to go over the shoals around it. Besides, the current is very uneven...
...daily papers last summer, that to study these currents and use them was a great science, and whichever crew used head-work enough to avail itself of them ought to have the benefit. The author of that suggestion must have forgotten that the positions of the crews at the start are given out by lot, and I hope that he does not accuse any of his friends of using head-work or management in the drawing of places...
Perhaps in no course will it be possible not to give advantage to some crews over others in assigning the positions, but where five crews start in a current one eighth of a mile per hour, and six others in one of nine eighths of a mile per hour, it is an easy piece of calculation to see that in five minutes the six would be carried four hundred and forty feet ahead by the difference in current. If the five outside of the current could make up the difference and keep even with the others until...