of his reading, he looked up, smiled over his spectacles, and
said:

"Oxford has won the boat-race."

Taffy had been deep in the Fifth Aeneid for some weeks, and
boat-racing ran much in his mind.

"Who is Oxford?" he asked.

Mr. Raymond took off his spectacles and wiped them. It came on him
suddenly that this child, whom he loved, was shut out from many of
his dearest thoughts.

"Oxford is a city," he answered; and added, "the most beautiful city
in the world."

"Shall I ever go there?" Taffy asked.

Mr. Raymond walked off without seeming to hear the question.
But that evening after supper he told the most wonderful tales of
Oxford, while Taffy listened and hoped his mother would forget his
bedtime; and Humility listened too, bending over her _guipure_.
The love with which he looked back to Oxford was the second passion
of Samuel Raymond's life; and Humility was proud of it, not jealous
at all. He forgot all the struggle, all the slights, all the grip of
poverty. To him those years had become an heroic age, and men
Homeric men. And so he made them appear to Taffy, to whom it was
wonderful that his father should have moved among such giants.

"And shall I go there too?"

Humility glanced up quickly, and met her husband's eyes.

"Some day, please God!" she said. Mr. Raymond stared at the embers
of wreck-wood on the hearth.

From that night Oxford became the main scene of Taffy's imaginings; a
wholly fictitious Oxford, pieced together of odds and ends from
picture-books, and peopled with all the old heroes. And so, with
contests on the models of the Fifth Aeneid, the story went forward
gallantly for many months.

But the afternoons were long; and at times the interminable
sand-hills and everlasting roar of the sea oppressed the child with a
sense of loneliness beyond words. The rabbits and gulls would not
make friends with him, and he ached for companionship. Of that ache
was born his half-crazy adoration of George Vyell. There were hours
when he lay in some nook of the towans, peering into the ground,
seeing pictures in the sand--pictures of men and regiments and
battles, shifting with the restless drift; until, unable to bear it,
he flung out his hands to efface them, and hid his face in the sand,
sobbing, "George! George!"

At night he would creep out of bed to watch the lighthouse winking
away in the north-east. George lived somewhere beyond. And again it
would be "George! George!"

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