I looked over at the other boat. Montmorency was barking, and George and Harris appeared to be doubled over with laughter.

“Are you all right?” Jerome K. Jerome called to me.

I nodded back vigorously, and they waved and rowed on, still laughing, toward the Battle of the Swans and Oxford and history.

“I said, hold the lines steady,” Terence said disgustedly.

“I know. Sorry,” I said, stepping over Cyril, who had slept through the entire thing and who consequently missed his chance to meet a Truly Famous Dog. On the other hand, remembering Montmorency’s proclivity for fights and his sarcastic manner, it was probably just as well.

“I saw someone I knew,” I said, helping him pick up the luggage. “A writer,” and then realized that if they were just now on their way upriver, Three Men in a Boat must not have been written yet. I hoped when it came out, Terence wouldn’t read the copyright page.

“Where’s my net?” Professor Peddick said. “These waters are perfect for Tinca vulgaris.”

It took us till noon to get the luggage stowed and tied down again and to disentangle Professor Peddick from his Tinca vulgaris, but after that we made excellent time. We were past Little Wittenbaum before two. If we didn’t have any trouble at Day’s Lock, we could still be to Streatley by dinnertime.

We came through Day’s Lock in record time. And ran bang into a traffic jam.

The reason the river had been so empty before was because the entire armada had gathered here. Punts, canoes, outriggers, double-sculling skiffs, covered rowing boats, eights, barges, rafts, and houseboats jammed the river, all of them heading upstream and none of them in a hurry.

Girls with parasols chattered to girls with parasols in other boats and called to their companions to pull alongside. People on launches strung with banners reading, “Lower Middlesex Musical Society Annual Outing” and “Mothers’ Beanfeast” leaned over the railings to shout to people in pleasure boats below.

Clearly none of them had to be anywhere at a certain time. Middle-aged men on houseboats sat on the decks reading the Times while their middle-aged wives, clothespins in their mouths, hung up the washing.

A girl in a sailor dress and a beribboned straw hat poled a flat skiff slowly among them and stood there laughing when the pole stuck in the mud. An artist in a yellow smock stood motionless on a raft in the middle of the melee, painting a landscape on an easel, though how he could see said landscape over the flower-decked hats and parasols and fluttering Union Jacks, I had no idea.

A rower from one of the colleges, in a striped cap and jersey, cracked oars with a pleasure party’s paddles and stopped to apologize, and a sailboat nearly crashed into them from behind. I yanked on the lines and nearly crashed into all three.

“I’d best steer,” Terence said, scrambling up to change places when our boat hit an empty slot between a four-oared outrigger and a dinghy.

“Excellent idea,” I said, but rowing was worse. Facing backward, I couldn’t see anything and had the feeling I was going to run into the Upper Slaughter Ironmongers’ River Excursion at any moment.

“This is worse than the Henley Regatta,” Terence said, pulling on the lines. He maneuvered the boat out of the main current and off to the side, but that was even worse. It brought us into the midst of the punts and houseboats that were being towed, their towlines stretched across our path like so many tripwires.

The people towing weren’t in any hurry, either. Girls pulled a few feet and then paused to look laughingly back at the boat. Couples stopped to look longingly into each other’s eyes, letting the towline go limp in the water, and then remembered what they were supposed to be doing and yanked it up sharply. Jerome K. Jerome had written about a couple who’d lost their boat and gone on, talking and towing the frayed rope, but it seemed to me a greater danger was decapitation, and I kept glancing anxiously behind me like Catherine Howard.

There was a sudden flurry of activity upriver. A whistle shrieked and someone cried, “Look out!”

“What is it?” I said.

“A bloody teakettle,” Terence said, and a steam launch puffed through the crowd, scattering the boats and sending up a tremendous wash.

The boat rocked, and one of the oars unshipped. I made a grab for it and the carpetbag, and Terence raised his fist and cursed at the steam launch’s vanishing wake.

“They remind one of Hannibal’s elephants at the Battle of the Ticinus River,” Professor Peddick, who had just awakened, said, and launched into a description of Hannibal’s Italian campaign.

We were in the Alps and in traffic all the way to Wallingford. We sat in line for Benson’s Lock for over an hour, with Terence taking out his pocket watch and announcing the time every three minutes.

“Three o’clock,” he said. Or “A quarter past three.” Or “Nearly half past. We’ll never make it in time for tea.”

I shared his sentiment. The last time I’d opened the carpetbag, Princess Arjumand had stirred ominously, and as we pulled into the lock I could hear faint meowings, which luckily were drowned out by the crowd noise and professor Peddick’s lecturing.

“Traffic was responsible for Napoleon’s losing the battle of Waterloo,” he said. “The artillery wagons became stuck in the mud, blocking the roads, and the infantry could not make its way past them. How often history turns on such trivial things, a blocked road, a delayed corps of infantry, orders gone astray.”

At Wallingford the traffic abruptly disappeared, the punts stopping to camp and start supper, the Musical Society disembarking and heading for the railway station and home, and the river was suddenly empty.

But we were still six miles and another lock from Muchings End.

“It’ll be nine o’clock before we get there,” Terence said despairingly.

“We can camp near Moulsford,” Professor Peddick said. “There are excellent perch above the weir there.”

“I think we should stay at an inn,” I said. “You’ll want a chance to clean up. You’ll want to look your best for Miss Mering. You can shave and have your flannels pressed and your shoes shined, and we can go to Muchings End first thing in the morning.”

And I can sneak out with the carpetbag after everyone’s gone to bed, and return the cat without being seen, so that by the time Terence gets there tomorrow morning the incongruity will already be correcting itself. And he’ll find Tossie holding hands with Mr Cabbagesoup or Coalscuttle or whatever his name is.

“There are two inns in Streatley,” Terence said, consulting the map. “The Bull and The Swan. The Swan. Trotters says it brews an excellent ale.”

“It hasn’t any swans, has it?” I said, glancing warily at Cyril, who had awakened and was looking nervous.

“I shouldn’t think so,” Terence said. “The George and Dragon doesn’t have a dragon.”

We rowed on. The sky turned the same blue as my hatband and then a pale lavender, and several stars came out. The frogs and crickets started up, and more faint mewings from the carpetbag.

I pulled up sharply on the oars, making a good deal of splashing, and asked Professor Peddick exactly where his and Professor Overforce’s theories differed, which got us to Cleve Lock, where I jumped out, fed the cat some milk, and then set the carpetbag in the bow on top of the luggage as far from Terence and Professor Peddick as possible.

“The action of the individual, that’s the force driving history,” Professor Peddick was saying. “Not Overforce’s blind, impersonal forces. ‘The history of the world is but the biography of great men,’ Carlyle writes, and so it is. Copernicus’s genius, Cincinnatus’s ambition, St. Francis of Assisi’s faith: It is character that shapes history.”

It was fully dark, and the houses were lit by the time we reached Streatley.