Off they went!  The French galleys lumbering along at a great pace, their crews pulling a curiously short stroke, and their coxswains yelling “En avant, mes braves!” with all the strength of their lungs.  It must have been very like the boat-race Virgil describes in the fifth book of the Aeneid.  There was the “huge Chimaera” the “mighty Centaur” and possibly even the “dark-blue Scylla” with their modern counterparts of Gyas, Sergestus, and Cloanthus, bawling just as lustily as doubtless those coxswains of old shouted; no one, however, struck on the rocks, as we are told the unfortunate “Centaur” did.  Still the little mahogany-built Abercorn continued to forge ahead of her unwieldy French competitors.  The Frenchmen splashed and spurted nobly, but the little Oxford-built boat increased her lead, her silken “Union Jack” trailing in the water.  All the muscles of the French fleet came into play; the admiral’s barge churned the water into creaming foam; “mes braves” were incited to superhuman exertions; in spite of it all, the Abercorn shot past the mark-boat, a winner by a length and a half.

My father was absolutely frantic with delight.  We reached the shore long before our crew did, for they had to return to receive the judge’s formal award.  He ceremoniously decorated our boat’s bows with a large laurel-wreath, and so—­her stem adorned with laurels, and the large silk “Union Jack” trailing over her stern—­ the little mahogany Oxford-built boat paddled through the lines of her French competitors.  I am sorry to have to record that the French took their defeat in a most unsportsmanlike fashion; the little Abercorn was received all down the line with storms of hoots and hisses.  Possibly we, too, might feel annoyed if, say at Portsmouth, in a regatta in which all the crack oarsmen of the British Home Fleet were competing, a French four should suddenly appear from nowhere, and walk off with the big prize of the day.  Still, the conditions of the Cannes regatta were clear; this was an open race, open to any nationality, and to any rowing craft of any size or build, though the result was thought a foregone certainty for the French naval crews.

Our crew were terribly exhausted when they landed.  They had had a very very severe pull, in a heavy sea, and with a strong head-wind against them, and most of them were no longer young; still, after a bath and a change of clothing, and, quite possibly, a brandy-and-soda or two (nobody ever drank whisky in the “sixties"), they pulled themselves together again.  It was Lord Mount Edgcumbe who first suggested that as there was an afternoon dance that day at the Cercle Nautique de la Mediterranee, they should all adjourn to the club and dance vigorously, just to show what sturdy, hard-bitten dogs they were, to whom a strenuous three-mile pull in a heavy sea was a mere trifle, even though some of them were forty years old.  So off we all went to the Cercle, and I well remember seeing my brother-in-law and Sir George Higginson gyrating wildly and ceaselessly round the ball-room, tired out though they were.  Between ourselves, our French friends were immensely impressed with this exhibition of British vigour, and almost forgave our boat for having won the rowing championship of the Mediterranean.