ws,
and drank countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow,
frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how
tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled
through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral
chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall
perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries
shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths
shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice
of their charmer. Not the pyramids themselves give me that sense of
the continuity of the generations, the ebb and flow of youth and
youth's hot loves and hot regrets and the inexorable twilight that
makes placid middle age, as do those grey walls and blooming closes of
what I sometimes think is the very heart's core of England. My
mother's countrymen may fill London with their national caravanseries
and castles with their nation's lovely (if somewhat nasal) daughters,
but Oxford shall defy them forever.

The infatuated undergrad was the owner of a banjo, an instrument
hitherto unknown to Margarita and in regard to which she was vastly
curious, and at her request he and three of his mates blushingly sang
for her some of the American negro melodies then so popular among
them. She was delighted with them and soon began to hum and croon
unconsciously, the velvet of her voice mingling most piquantly with
their sweet throaty English singing. By little and little her tones
swelled louder and more bell-like: theirs softened gradually, till the
harmony, so simple, yet so inevitable, dwindled to the nearest echo
and barely breathed the quaint, primitive words:

_"Nellie was a lady--
Last night she died ..."_

Those deep tones of hers, stolen from envious contraltos, turned in
our ears to a mourning purple; a sombre, tender gloom haunted us, and
the sorrow of life, that alone binds us together who live, hung like a
lifting cloud over all who came within the magic radius of her voice.
The people gathered like bees to a honeycomb from all sides; black
caps and pale clear draperies drifted into a wondering circle; the
clink of cups, the murmur of gentle English voices died softly away
and the silence that was always her royal right spread around her.

_"Toll the bell for lovely Nell,
My dark ... Virginia ... bride!"_

Who they were, those listening hundreds, I could not