Captain Webb has achieved a great feat, but his success
seems not unlikely to drive our usually rather stolid population a little crazy on the subject of swimming. Miss Beckwith, fired with an athlete's ardour, swam last week from London Bridge to Green- wich, to show what a young girl could do ; and, outstripping her, last Saturday Migis Emily Parker swam from London Bridge to Blackwall, a distance of nearly seven miles, in an hour and thirty-five minutes. Emulating these young ladies, one or two men have, almost without training, swum from London Bridge to Greenwich, and on Tuesday night a Mr. John Skain lost his life in the effort to win a bet that he would swim for two hours in the Surrey Canal without landing. He swam for about an hour and a half in that canal, and in the Cumberland Canal basin through which it runs, and then appears to have sunk, through cramp or cold or exhaustion, without even crying out for help. His body was recovered at half-past two on Wednesday morning by the help of a drag, but life was extinct. In fact, Captain Webb's great romance of swimming has set all our little swimmers trying their hands at some humble novellette of the same kind,—which is very foolish, especially when it takes a virtual suicide to give any éclat to the tale.
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