ing
when one considers the distressing conditions under which the students
work. The lack of an adequate building fund compels them to go on
working in the same old buildings which they have had for centuries.
The buildings at Brasenose College have not been renewed since the year
1525. In New College and Magdalen the students are still housed in the
old buildings erected in the sixteenth century. At Christ Church I was
shown a kitchen which had been built at the expense of Cardinal Wolsey
in 1527. Incredible though it may seem, they have no other place to cook
in than this and are compelled to use it to-day. On the day when I
saw this kitchen, four cooks were busy roasting an ox whole for the
students' lunch: this at least is what I presumed they were doing from
the size of the fire-place used, but it may not have been an ox; perhaps
it was a cow. On a huge table, twelve feet by six and made of slabs of
wood five inches thick, two other cooks were rolling out a game pie. I
estimated it as measuring three feet across. In this rude way, unchanged
since the time of Henry VIII, the unhappy Oxford students are fed. I
could not help contrasting it with the cosy little boarding houses
on Cottage Grove Avenue where I used to eat when I was a student at
Chicago, or the charming little basement dining-rooms of the students'
boarding houses in Toronto. But then, of course, Henry VIII never lived
in Toronto.

The same lack of a building-fund necessitates the Oxford students,
living in the identical old boarding houses they had in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called "quadrangles,"
"closes" and "rooms"; but I am so broken in to the usage of my student
days that I can't help calling them boarding houses. In many of these
the old stairway has been worn down by the feet of ten generations of
students: the windows have little latticed panes: there are old names
carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick growth of ivy covers
the walls. The boarding house at St. John's College dates from 1509, the
one at Christ Church from the same period. A few hundred thousand pounds
would suffice to replace these old buildings with neat steel and brick
structures like the normal school at Schenectady, N.Y., or the Peel
Street High School at Montreal. But nothing is done. A movement was
indeed attempted last autumn towards removing the ivy from the walls,
but the result was unsatisfactory and they are putting it b