and there are two or three such fine dark
willows stretching over the Cherwell; I think some dryad inhabits them:
and, as you wind along, just over your right shoulder is the Long Walk,
with the Oxford buildings seen between the elms. They say there are dons
here who recollect when the foliage was unbroken, nay, when you might
walk under it in hard rain, and get no wet. I know I got drenched there
the other day."

Sheffield laughed, and said that Charles must put on his beaver, and
walk with him a different way. He wanted a good walk; his head was
stupid from his lectures; that old Jennings prosed so awfully upon
Paley, it made him quite ill. He had talked of the Apostles as neither
"deceivers nor deceived," of their "sensible miracles," and of their
"dying for their testimony," till he did not know whether he himself was
an _ens physiologicum_ or a _totum metaphysicum_, when Jennings had
cruelly asked him to repeat Paley's argument; and because he had not
given it in Jennings' words, friend Jennings had pursed up his lips, and
gone through the whole again; so intent, in his wooden enthusiasm, on
his own analysis of it, that he did not hear the clock strike the hour;
and, in spite of the men's shuffling their feet, blowing their noses,
and looking at their watches, on he had gone for a good twenty minutes
past the time; and would have been going on even then, he verily
believed, but for an interposition only equalled by that of the geese at
the Capitol. For that, when he had got about half through his
recapitulation, and was stopping at the end of a sentence to see the
impression he was making, that uncouth fellow, Lively, moved by what
happy inspiration he did not know, suddenly broke in, apropos of
nothing, nodding his head, and speaking in a clear cackle, with, "Pray,
sir, what is your opinion of the infallibility of the Pope?" Upon which
every one but Jennings did laugh out: but he, _au contraire_, began to
look very black; and no one can tell what would have happened, had he
not cast his eyes by accident on his watch, on which he coloured, closed
his book, and _instanter_ sent the whole lecture out of the room.

Charles laughed in his turn, but added, "Yet, I assure you, Sheffield,
that Jennings, stiff and cold as he seems, is, I do believe, a very good
fellow at bottom. He has before now spoken to me with a good deal of
feeling, and has gone out of his way to do me favours. I see poor bodies
coming to him for cha