ncs_, the dinners to which I was invited by some of
the Fellows in Hall, or in Common Room, surprised me not a little. The
old plate, the old furniture, and the whole style of living, impressed
me deeply, particularly the after-dinner railway, an ingenious
invention for lightening the trouble of the guests who took wine in
Common Room. There was a small railway fixed before the fireplace, and
on it a wagon containing the bottles went backwards and forwards,
halting before every guest till he had helped himself. That railway, I
am afraid, is gone now; and what is more serious, the pleasant, chatty
evenings spent in Common Room are likewise a thing of the past.
Married Fellows, if they dine in Hall, return home after dinner, and
junior Fellows go to their books or pupils. In my early Oxford days, a
married Fellow would have sounded like a solecism. The story goes that
married Fellows were not entirely unknown, and that you could hold
even a fellowship, if you could hold your tongue. Young people,
however, who did not possess that gift of silence, had often to wait
till they were fifty, before a college living fell vacant, and the
quinquagenarian Fellow became a young husband and a young vicar.

What impressed me, however, even more than the great hospitality of
Oxford, was the real friendliness shown to an unknown German scholar.
After all, I had done very little as yet, but the kind words which
Bunsen and Dr. Prichard had spoken about me at the meeting of the
British Association, had evidently produced an impression in my favour
far beyond what I deserved. I must have seemed a very strange bird,
such as had never before built his nest at Oxford. I was very young,
but I looked even younger than I was, and my knowledge of the manners
of society, particularly of English society, was really nil. Few
people knew what I was working at. Some had a kind of vague impression
that I had discovered a very old religion, older than the Jewish and
the Christian, which contained the key to many of the mysteries that
had puzzled the ancient, nay, even the modern world. Frequently, when
I was walking through the streets of Oxford, I observed how people
stared at me, and seemed to whisper some information about me.
Tradespeople did not always trust me, though I never owed a penny to
anybody; when I wanted money I could always make it by going on faster
with printing the Rig-veda, for which I received four pounds a sheet.
This seemed to me