I saw other interesting things at Canterbury, notably St. Martin's old church (perhaps the most venerable in the kingdom),[7] and left for London, where, walking through Hyde Park on a sunshiny Sunday morning, I lingered awhile to watch the perfervid stump-orators wasting their eloquence on the most listless of audiences. "Come along, Mary Ann, let's give one of the other blokes a turn," was the prevailing sentiment; but I did manage to catch one gem from a Free Thought spouter, whose advocacy of _post mortem_ annihilation was being violently assailed by one of his hearers. "Do you mean to tell me," shouted the heckler, "that when I am dead I fade absolutely away and am done with for ever?"--to which query came the prompt {10} reply, "I sincerely hope so, sir!"[8] Lord Cathcart (a great frequenter of the Park), to whom I repeated the above repartee, amused me by quoting an unconsciously funny phrase he had heard from a labour orator near the Marble Arch: "What abaht the working man? The working man is the backbone of this country--and I tell you _strite_, that backbone 'as got to come to the front!"[9] I left Paddington for Oxford in absolutely the blackest fog I had ever seen: it turned brown at Baling, grey at Maidenhead, and at Didcot the sun was shining quite cheerfully. I found the floods almost unprecedentedly high, and the "loved city" abundantly justifying its playful sobriquet of "Spires and Ponds." A Catholic freshman, housed in the ground floor of Christ Church Meadow-buildings, described to me his dismay at the boldness and voracity of the rats which invaded his rooms from the meadows when the floods were out. The feelings of Lady Bute when she visited Oxford about this time, and found her treasured son--who had boarded at a private tutor's at Harrow, and had never roughed it in his life--literally immured in an underground cellar beneath Peckwater Quad, may be {11} better imagined than described. It is fair to add that the youth himself had made no complaint, and shouted with laughter when I paid him a visit in his extraordinary subterranean quarters in the richest college in Oxford.