I was always bidden to (and pleased, when I could to attend) the numerous weddings of my youthful relatives. One, in these early summer days, was that of my pretty cousin, Eleanor Bowlby, to a Dorrien-Smith, heir-apparent to the "King of Scilly," as his sobriquet was, though I believe his proper local title was "Lord Proprietor." I sat at the ceremony next to my brother-in-law Charles Dalrymple, who did not approve of the ever-popular "O for the Wings of a Dove!" which a little chorister warbled in the course of the service. {142} "Absurd and unreal!" I heard him mutter. "They are going to Paris for their honeymoon, and don't want doves' wings, or to be at rest either."[5] On the same evening I attended, at the invitation of the genial head master of University College School (whom I had known when on the staff of Inverness College), an excellent presentation of _Alcestis_ in the fine oak-panelled hall of his school at Hampstead. Not all the audience witnessed dry-eyed the death of the poor heroine; the sustained pathos, too, of Admetus was admirably portrayed; but the chief honours of the evening fell to a young hero of six-foot-four, who had played great cricket for the school against the M.C.C., and was a most doughty and convincing Herakles. A very pleasant evening's entertainment, which I had to abandon not quite completed to catch the midnight train to Oxford; for I was interested in a debate in Convocation next day, on the perennial problem of how and where to house the ever-increasing thousands of books accruing to the Bodleian Library. There were some drastic suggestions thrown out--one, if I remember right, was to make a bonfire of all the obsolete works on theology, philosophy and natural science! but our final decision was to adopt somebody's ingenious proposal to excavate underground chambers, with room for a million or so volumes, under the grass-plots round the Radcliffe camera. This point settled, I went to lunch with my friend Hadow in his rooms at Worcester, the former calefactory or recreation-room (so he said) of {143} our whilom Benedictine students, and looking out on a long narrow raised garden which there is reason to believe was once the monastic bowling-green. I thought, as often before, of the many unknown nooks and corners in this dear Oxford of ours, each bearing its silent witness to some phase of her "strange eventful history."