An American at Oxford

han in an Oxford garden. The high walls are at once a trap for the first warm rays of the sun and a barrier against the winds of March. The daffodils and crocuses spring

d live four years in these gardens of delight and not be made gentler and nobler!" Perhaps! though not altogether in the way the visitor imagines. When the flush of summer is on, the loite

," saying that if men put unmanly boxes of flowers in the window, how can they expect to beat Yale? Flower boxes, no sand. At Oxford they manage things so that anybody may have flower boxes; and their associations are by no means unmanly. This is the way they do it. In the early summer a gardener's wagon

ord-mount to the top of that most beautiful of Gothic towers, and, standing among the pinnacles,-pinnacles afire with the spirituality of the Middle Ages, that warms all the senses with purity and beauty,-those boys, I say, on that tower and among those pinnacles, open their mouths and sing a Latin song to greet the May. Meantime, the fellows who have come out to listen in the street below make catcalls and blow fish horns. The

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gown high about his neck, as it is usually worn of an evening, and bidding the porter a polite good-night, say, "Charge me to my brother, Hancock, if you please." The charge is the inconsiderable sum of one penny, and is the penalty of having a late guest. Having profited by my experience with the similar charge for keeping my name on the college

lmost without exception they are honored in the breach. This is out of disregard for the Vice-Chancellor of the university, who is familiarly called the Vice, because he serves as a warning to others for the practice of virtue. The Vice makes his power felt in characteristically dark and tortuous ways. His factors are two proctors, college dons in daytime, but skulkers after nightfall, each of whom has his bulldogs, that is, scouts employed literally to spy upon the students. If these catch you without cap or gown, they cause you to be proctorized or "progged," as it is called, which involves a matter of five shillings or so. As a rule there is little danger of pr

duates resolved no less firmly to defend their stronghold. The result was a hand-to-hand fight with the bulldogs, which ended so triumphantly for the undergraduates that a dozen or more of them were sent down. In the articles of the peace that followed, it was stipulated, I was told, that so long as the restaurant was closed Sunday afternoons and nig

outlawry and ruin, and for certain offenses a citizen may be punished by imprisonment. Over the Oxford theatre the Vice-Chancellor's power is absolute. In my time he was much more solicitous that the undergraduate be kept from knowledge of the omnipresent woman wit

metimes make a row. A lot of B. N. C. men, as the clanny sons of Brazenose College call themselves, may insist that an opera stop while the troupe listen to one of their own excellent vocal performances; and I once saw a great sprinter, not unknown to Yale men, rise from his seat, face the audience, and, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at the so

d yourself in the streets after twelve, you may rap on some friend's bedroom window and tell him of your plight through the iron grating. He will then spend the first half of the night in your bed and wash his hands in your bowl. With such evidence as this to sup

t how cloistral it is in spirit no one can know who has not taken part in a rag in the quad; and this is impos