quette--1871," and "Hidden Depths."

No account of the famous women at Oxford would be complete without a
reference to Miss Marion Hughes--the first Sister of Mercy in the Church
of England--professed on Trinity Sunday, 1841, and still the
Foundress-Mother of the Convent of the Holy and Undivided Trinity at
Oxford.

* * * * *

I said at the beginning of this chapter that my Oxford life was divided
sharply into two halves. Neither the climate nor the way of living ever
suited my health. In my first term I fell into the doctor's hands, and
never escaped from them so long as I was an undergraduate. I well
remember the decisive counsel of the first doctor whom I consulted (not
Dr. Acland). "What wine do you drink?" "None--only beer." "Oh! that's
all nonsense. You never will be able to live in this climate unless you
drink port, and plenty of it."

To this generous prescription I dutifully submitted, but even port was
powerless to keep me well at Oxford. I always felt "seedy"; and the
nervous worry inseparable from a time of spiritual storm and stress (for
four of my most intimate friends seceded to Rome) told upon me more than
I knew. An accidental chill brought things to a climax, and during the
Christmas vacation of 1874 I was laid low by a sharp attack of
_myelitis_, mistaken at the time for rheumatic fever. I heard the last
stroke of midnight, December 31, in a paroxysm of pain which, for years
after, I never could recall without feeling sick. I lost two terms
through illness, and the doctors were against my returning to the damps
of Oxford. However, I managed to hobble back on two sticks, maimed for
life, and with all dreams of academical distinction at an end. But what
was more important was that my whole scheme of life was dissipated.
Henceforward it was with me, as with Robert Elsmere after his malaria
at Cannes--"It was clear to himself and everybody else that he must do
what he could, and not what he would, in the Christian vineyard." The
words have always made me smile; but the reality was no smiling matter.
The remainder of my life at Oxford was of necessity lived at half-speed;
and in this place I must commemorate, with a gratitude which the lapse
of years has never chilled, the extraordinary kindness and tenderness
with which my undergraduate friends tended and nursed me in that time of
crippledom.[18] Prince Leopold, then an undergraduate of Christ Church,
and living at Wyke