A Passionate Pilgrim

of the supreme gratifications of travel for any American aware of the ancient pieties of race. The impression it produces, t

and sunless courts, and the dark verdure soothing and cooling to bookish eyes. The grey-green quadrangles stand for ever open with a trustful hospitality. The seat of the humanities is stronger in her own good manners than in a marshalled host of wardens and beadles. Directly after our arrival my friend and I wandered forth in the luminous early dusk. We reached the bridge that under-spans the walls of Magdalen and saw the eight-spired tower, delicately fluted and embossed, rise in temperate beauty - the perfect prose of Gothic - wooing the eyes to the sky that was slowly drained of day. We entered the low monkish doorway and stood in the dim little court that nestles beneath the tower, where the swallows nic

ng fellow as we meet him, dark or fair, tall or short, reminds me of the past age and the early attachment. Even as we stand here, they say, the whole thing feels about its massive base the murmurs of the tide of time; some of the foundation-stones are loosened, some of the bre

resh, whether floated down the current by idle punts and lounging in friendly couples when not in a singleness that nursed ambitions, or straining together in rhythmic crews and hoarsely exhorted from the near bank. When to the exhibition of so much of the clearest joy of wind and limb we added the great sense of perfumed protection shed by all the enclosed lawns and groves and bowers, we felt that to be young in such scholastic shades must be a double, an infinite blessing. As my companion found himself less and less able to walk we repaired in turn to a series of gardens and spent long hours sitting in their greenest places. They struck us as the fairest things in England and the ripest and sweetest fruit of the English system. Locked in their antique verdure, guarded, as in the case of New College, by gentle battlements of silver-grey, outshouldering the matted leafage of undisseverable plants, filled with nightingales and memor

spires and towers do for these people? Are they wiser, gentler, finer, cleverer? My diminished dignity reverts in any case at moments to the naked background of our own education, the deadly dry air in which we gasp for impressions and comparisons. I assent to it all with a sort of desperate calmness; I accept it with a dogged pride. We're nursed at the opposite pole. Naked come we into a naked world. There's a certain grandeur in the lack of decorations, a certain heroic strain in that young imagination of ours which finds nothing made to its hands, which has to invent its own traditions and raise high into our morning-air, with a ringing hammer and nails, the castles in which we dwell. Noblesse oblige - Oxford must damnably do so. What a horrible thing not to rise to such examples! If you pay the pious debt to the last farthing of interest you may go through life with her blessing; but if you let it stand unhonoured you're a worse barbarian than we! But for the better or worse, in a myriad private hearts, think how she must be loved! How the youthful sentiment of mankind seems visibly to brood upon her! Think of the young lives now taking colour in her cloisters and halls. Thin

At the same time it completed his knowledge of the place. Making the acquaintance of several tutors and fellows, he dined in hall in half a dozen colleges, alluding afterwards to these banquets with religious unction. One evening after a participation indiscreetly prolonged he came back to the hotel in a cab, accompanied by a friendly undergraduate and a physician and looking deadly pale. He had swooned away on leaving table and remained so rigidly unconscious as much to agitate his banqueters. The following twenty-four hours he of course spent in bed, but on the third day declared himself strong enough to begin afresh. On his reaching the street his strength once more forsook him, so that I insisted on his returning to his room. He besought me with tears in his eyes not to shut him up. "It's my last chance - I want to go back for an hour to that garden of Saint John's. Let me eat and drink - tomorrow I die." It seemed to me possible that with a Bath-chair the expedition might be accomplished. The hotel, it appeared, possessed such a convenience, which was immediately produced. It became necessary hereupon that we should have a person to propel the chair. As there was no one on the spot at liberty I was about to perform the office; but just as my patient had got seated and wrapped - he now had a perpetual chill - an elderly man emerged from a lurking-place near the door and, with a formal salute, offered to wait upon the gentleman. We assented, and he proceeded solemnly to trundle the chair before him. I recognised him as a vague personage w

y," said Searle, "so that I may see

ur attendant, "all these

pregnant gravity. And as we were passing one of t

to stop and come round within si

eem to take it ill of her. If you'll allow me to wheel you

owner alongside and turned to me. "While we're here, my dear fellow," he said, "be so good as to perform this service. You understand?" I gave our companion a glance of intelligence and we resumed our way. The latter showed us his window of the better time, where a rosy youth in a scarlet smoking-fez now puffed a cigarette at the open casement. Thence we proceeded into the small garden, the smallest, I believe

ur friend, who bent

er I most admire or most abominate you! Now tell me:

iped his forehead with an indescribable fabric drawn from his

"I've a fellow-feeling. If you're a

o," said the stranger with an a

you've fallen from a height. From a gentleman commoner - is that what they called yo

nce, sir. I dropped a bit

e!" cried Searle wit

riend, "I believe I c

ed his hand and shook it -"I too a

re's a difference between sitting in such a ple

de. But I'm at my la

y last pe

ly, Mr.

've almost come to the point of drinking my beer and butt

gaiety at the expense of Mr. Rawson's troubles, I took the lib

wife to her mother's, who can ill afford to keep her, and came to Oxford a week ago, thinking I might pick up a few half-crowns by showing people about the colleges. But it's no use. I

Searle, "why didn't y

es I've been on the point of i

e, laughing. "My dear Mr. Rawson, Ame

that same. You say you're a pauper, but it takes an American paupe

the most delicious corner of the ancien

to keep afloat yonder than here. I wish I were in Yankeeland, that's all!" he added with feeble force. Then brooding for a moment on his wrongs: "Have you a bloated brother? or you, sir? It matters little to you. But it has matt

land!" said S

er never helped

been what I should. I married dreadfully out of the way. But the devil of it is that he started fair and I started foul; with the

of months ago that he couldn't afford

with him!" And Mr. Rawson looked quai

ut fair starts and false starts. I'm at that point myself that I've a right to speak. It lies neither in one's chance nor one's start to make one a success; nor in anything one's brother - however bloated - can do or can undo. It lies in one's characte

ty of his general rebellion against fate. In the course of a minute a due self-respect yielded to the warm comfortable sense of his being relieved o

should be glad to think you had felt for a moment the side-light of that great undar

omething tells me that my luck may be in your country - which has brought luck to so many. I can come on the parish here of course, but I don't want to come on the parish. Hang it, sir, I want to hold up my head. I see thirty years of life before me yet. If only by God's help I could have a real change of air! It's a fixed idea of mine. I've had it for the last ten years. It's not that I'm a low radical. Oh

nion that it was time we should bring our small session to a close, and he, without hesitating, possessed himself of the handle of the Bath-chair and pushed it before him. We had got halfway home before Searle spoke or moved. Suddenly in the High Street, as we passed a chop-house from whose open doors we caught a waft

ich his poor dispossessed hand closed upon the crisp paper, I observed his empurpled nostril convulsive under the other solicitation. He crushed the crackling note in

aguely felt gathering beneath his stupor. "My cousin, my cousin," he said confusedly. "Is she here?" It was the first time he had spoken of Miss Searle since our retreat from her brother's house, and he continued to ramble. "I was to have married her. What a dream! That day was like a string of verses - rhymed hours. But the last verse is bad measure. What's the rhyme to 'love'? ABOVE! Was she a simple woman, a kind sweet woman? Or have I only dreamed it? She had the healing gift; her t

maunder about many things, confounding in a sinister jumble the memories of the past weeks and those of bygone years. "By the way," he said suddenly, "I've made no will. I haven't much to bequeath. Yet I have something." He had been playing listlessly with a large signet-ring on his left hand, which he now tried to draw off. "I leave you this"- working it round and round vainly -"if you can get it off. What enormous knuckles! There must be such knuckles in the mummies of the Pharaohs. Well, when I'm gone -!

nt to s

ing?" And he weighed them in his weak hands. "They're pretty heavy. Some hundred or so? O

n the premises. He returned in a few moments, introducing our dismal friend. Mr. Rawson was pale even to his nose and derived from his unaffectedly concer

ercy!" gaspe

ll be as good a one as I. Foolish me! Take these battered relics; you can sell them; let them help you on your way. They're gifts

most scared and with tears in his eyes. "Do come round and get

ney, you for yours. I hope

piteously from so strange a windfall. "It's like the angel

om, where in three words I proposed to him a rough valuation of our friend's trinkets. He asse

resumed my constant place near the head. Suddenly our patient opened his eyes wide. "She'll not come," he murmured. "Amen! she's an English sister." Five minutes passed; he started forward. "She's come, she's here!" he confidently quavered. His words conveyed to my mind so absolute an assurance tha

e. "He has just announced you," I said. And then with a fuller conscio

" she wailed. "Yo

shock, the sense of poetic justice somehow

n as she spoke. "He was thrown from his horse in the park

which the doctor withdrew. Searle opened his eyes and looked at her from head to foot. Suddenly he s

his hand. "Not for you, cousin," s

nic shock. "Dead! HE dead! Life itself!" And then after a

free. And now - NOW- wi

rk in the heavy shadow of her musty

the doctor had silently atteste

the blackest and widest of English yews and the little tower than which none in all England has

nd