ompany
between the riot of fancy and the labour of thought, or to fix the
balance between what he saw and what he imagined. He had already begun
playfully to exchange his identity for that of the earlier Clement
Searle, and he now delivered himself almost wholly in the character of
his old-time kinsman.

"THIS was my college, you know," he would almost anywhere break out,
applying the words wherever we stood--"the sweetest and noblest in
the whole place. How often have I strolled in this cloister with my
intimates of the other world! They are all dead and buried, but many a
young 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 breaches
will have to be repaired. Mine was the old unregenerate Oxford, the home
of rank abuses, of distinctions and privileges the most delicious and
invidious. What cared I, who was a perfect gentleman and with my pockets
full of money? I had an allowance of a thousand a year."

It was at once plain to me that he had lost the little that remained of
his direct grasp on life and was unequal to any effort of seeing things
in their order. He read my apprehension in my eyes and took pains to
assure me I was right. "I'm going straight down hill. Thank heaven it's
an easy slope, coated with English turf and with an English churchyard
at the foot." The hysterical emotion produced by our late dire
misadventure had given place to an unruffled calm in which the scene
about us was reflected as in an old-fashioned mirror. We took an
afternoon walk through Christ-Church meadow and at the river-bank
procured a boat which I pulled down the stream to Iffley and to the
slanting woods of Nuneham--the sweetest flattest reediest stream-side
landscape that could be desired. Here of course we encountered the
scattered phalanx of the young, the happy generation, clad in white
flannel and blue, muscular fair-haired magnificent fresh, 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
grove