If you are thinking of taking a trip on the river, and you are going to start from Oxford, take your own boat (unless you can take someone else's without being discovered) The boats that you can hire on the Thames above Marlow are all right: they do not let too much water in, and they have seats and things. But they are not really boats which you want people to see. The person who hires one of these boats is the kind of person who likes to stay under the trees. He likes to travel early in the morning or late at night, when there are not many people about to look at him. When he sees someone he knows, he gets out of the boat and hides behind a tree. I remember that some friends and I hired one of these boats one summer