How the next half hour passed for Philip, Davidson, McKay, Rice, and all that enraptured crew, as they received in the boat-house the friends who could press their way inside to congratulate them—this the reader may imagine. Philip and his friends forgot how exhausted they were in the delight of such praises and hand-shakings. As for Gerald and Mr. Marcy, they were among the first to greet them when they were cool enough to quit their shell for a few moments. Gerald was quite unnerved with rapture.
"O, Philip," he exclaimed, "I never was so glad over any thing in my life!" And the boy spoke the exact truth.
"You deserve to be carried home on a church-steeple—a blunt one—every one of you!" declared Mr. Marcy, adding to the patron of the Victors, who stood near him, "Mr. York, your young men have lost their laurels forever. Our boys don't intend to be beaten again." And, as a matter of fact, they never were; for the Ossokosee Club rowed them another year and utterly routed them, and before the third season the Victors were disbanded and a new organization had grown out of their ruins.
