How shall one do justice to so exquisite a thing as Oxford,--twenty-two colleges and halls, churches, museums and the like, with all their lovely spires, towers, buttresses, ancient walls, ancient doors, pinnacles, gardens, courts, angles and nooks which turn and wind and confront each other and break into broad views and delicious narrow vistas with a grace and an uncertainty which delights and surprises the imagination at every turn. I can think of nothing more exquisite than these wonderful walls, so old that whatever color they were originally, they now are a fine mottled black and gray, with uncertain patches of smoky hue, and places where the stone has crumbled to a dead white. Time has done so much; tradition has done so much; pageantry and memory; the art of the architect, the perfect labor of builder, the beauty of the stone itself, and then nature--leaves and trees and the sky! This day of rain and lowery clouds--though Sir Scorp insisted it could stand no comparison with sunshine and spring and the pathos of a delicious twilight was yet wonderful to me. Grays and blacks and dreary alterations of storm clouds have a remarkable value when joined with so delicate and gracious a thing as perfectly arranged stone. We wandered through alleys and courts and across the quadrangles of University College, Baliol College, Wadham College, Oriel College, up High Street, through Park Street, into the Chapel of Queens College, into the banquet of Baliol and again to the Bodleian Library, and thence by strange turns and lovely gateways to an inn for tea. It was raining all the while and I listened to disquisitions by Sir Scorp on the effect of the personalities, and the theories of both Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, not only on these buildings but on the little residences in the street. Everywhere, Sir Scorp, enthusiast that he is, found something--a line of windows done in pure Tudor, a clock tower after the best fashion of Jones, a façade which was Wren pure and simple. He quarreled delightfully, as the artist always will, with the atrocity of this restoration or that failure to combine something after the best manner, but barring the worst errors which showed quite plainly enough in such things as the Oxford art gallery and a modern church or two--it was all perfect. Time and tradition have softened, petted, made lovely even the plainest surfaces.