we united in a good opinion of his actual sovereign, whom it was fit, as a pensioner who had been "for-r-ty years in his Majesty's sar-r-vice," he should praise as "a good-natured gentleman." As for the late queen he had no terms to measure his affection and reverence for her. I do not know now by what circuit we had reached these topics from the Scriptural subjects with which we started, or how it was he came to express the strong sense he had of the Saviour's civility to the woman of Samaria, as something that should be "a lesson to our gentry" in kindly behavior to the poor.

Wherever he now is, I hope my friendly Scot is well, and I am sure he is happy. Our weather included, from the time we met till we parted after crossing the wide salt-marsh stretching between Rye and the sea, every vicissitude of sun and rain, with once a little hail; but I remember only an unclouded sky, which I think was his personal firmament. I left him at the little house of the daughter whom he said he was visiting, outside the only town-gate that remains to Rye from its medieval fortifications. There is a small parade, or promenade, at a certain point near by, fenced with peaceful guns, from which one may overlook all that wide level stretching to the sea-with a long gash of ship-channel and boats tilted by the ebb on its muddy shores-and carrying the eye to the houses and vessels of the port. Rye itself was once much more impressively the port, but the sea left it, long and long ago, standing like the bold headland it was, and still must look like when the fog washes in about its feet. It is an endearing little town, one of hundreds (I had almost said thousands) in England, with every comfort in the compass of its cosey streets; with a church, old, old, but not too dotingly Norman, and a lane opening from it to the door

of a certain house where one might almost live on the entrancing perspective of its tower and its graveyard trees. A damp blind beggar on a stone, who was never dry in his life, and was, of course, a mere mass of rheumatic aches and pains, is a feature common to so many perspectives in England that he need not be dwelt upon. What is precious about Rye is that with its great charm it does not insist upon being dramatically different from those hundreds or thousands of other lovely old towns. It keeps its history to itself, and I would no more invite the reader to intrude upon its past than I would ask him to join me in invading the private affairs of any English gentleman. A few people who know its charm come down from London for the summer months; but there is a reasonable hope that it will never be newer or other than it is. I myself would not have it changed in the least particular. I should like to go there May after May as long as the world stands, and hang upon the parapet of the small parade and look dreamfully seaward over the prairie-like level, and presently find myself joined by a weak-eyed, weak-voiced elder who draws my attention to the blossoming hawthorns beside us. One is white and one is pink, and between them is a third of pinkish-white. He wishes to know if it is so because the bees have inoculated it, and being of the mild make he is, he rather asks than asserts, "They do inockerlate 'em, sir?”

IX

OXFORD

T

HE friendly gentleman in our railway carriage who was good enough to care for my interest in the landscape between London and Oxford (I began to express it as soon as we got by a very broad, bad smell waiting our train, midway, in the region of some sort of chemical works) said he was going to Oxford for the Eights. Then we knew that we were going there for the Eights, too, though as to what the Eights are I have never been able to be explicit with myself to this day, beyond the general fact that they are intercollegiate boat-races and implicate Bumps, two of which we saw with satisfaction in due time. But while the towers of Oxford were growing from the plain, a petrified efflorescence of the past, lovelier than any new May-wrought miracle of leaf and flower, we had no thought but for Oxford, and Eights and Bumps were mere vocables no more resolvable into their separate significances than the notes of the jargoning rooks flying over the fields, or the noises of the station where each of our passengers was welcomed by at least three sons or brothers, and kept from claiming somebody else's boxes in the confiding distributions from the luggage-vans. As our passengers were mostly mothers and sisters, their boxes easily outnumbered them, and if a nephew and cousin or next friend had lent his aid in their rescue in the

worst cases, it could not have been superfluous. The ancient town is at other times a stronghold of learning, obedient to a tradition of cloistered men in whom the cloistered monk of other days still lingers, but at this happy time it was overflowed to its very citadel by a tide of feathered hats, of clinging and escaping scarfs, of fluffy skirts in all angelic colors; and I should not be true to that first impression of the meetings at the station, if I did not say that the meeters were quite lost, and well lost, in the multitude of the met. When they issued together from the place these contributed their advantageous disproportion to the effect of the streets, from which they swept the proper university life into corners and doorways, and up alleys and against walls, before their advancing flood.

Our own friend who, lief and dear as any son or brother or nephew or cousin of them all, came flying on the wings of his academic gown to greet us at the station, had in a wonderfully little while divined our baggage, and had it and us in an open carriage making a progress into the heart of the beautiful grove of towers, which nearer to, we perceived was no petrification, but a living growth from the soul of the undying youth coming age after age to perpetuate the university there. We began at once to see the body of this youth chasing singly or plurally down the streets, in tasselled mortarboards, and gowns clipped of their flow, to an effect of alpaca jackets. Youth can, or must, stand anything, and at certain hours of the morning and evening no undergraduate may show himself in Oxford streets without this abbreviated badge of learning, though the streets were that day so full of people thronging to the Eights and the Bumps that studious youth in the ordinary garb of the unstudious could hardly have awakened

suspicion in the authorities. We were, in fact, driving through a largeish town, peopled beyond its comfortable wont, and noisy with the rush of feet and wheels far frequenter and swifter than those which set its characteristic pace.

Our friend knew we were not, poor things, there for a tumult which we could have easily had in New York, or even in London, and he made haste to withdraw us from it up into a higher place at the top of the Radcliffe Library, where we could look down on all Oxford, with the tumult subsiding into repose under the foliage and amid the flowers of the college gardens. It is the wellknown view which every one is advised by the guidebooks to seize the first thing, and he could not have done better for us, even from his great love and lore of the place, than to point severally out each renowned roof and spire and tower which blent again for my rapture in a rich harmony with nothing jarring from the whole into any separately accentuated fact. I pretended otherwise, and I hope I satisfactorily seemed to know those tops and deeps one from another, when I ignorantly exclaimed, "Oh, Magdalen, of course! Christ Church! And is that Balliol? And Oriel, of course; and Merton, and Jesus, and Wadham-really Wadham? And New College, of course! And is that Brasenose?”

I honestly affected to remember them from a first visit twenty years before, when in a cold September rain I wandered about among them with a soul dryshod and warmed by an inner effulgence of joy in being there on any sort of terms. But I remembered nothing except the glory which nothing but the superior radiance of being there again in May could eclipse. What I remember now of this second sight of them will not let itself be put in words; it is the bird which sings in