Then the baker rushed into the room, in a cutaway Sunday coat of the latest style. He had baked for an Oxford college so long that he had become infected with the squeamish leaven of the nineteenth century. He called the girl a huzzy, and, taking her by the shoulder, hustled her into the garden, and then passed her plum pudding out to her gingerly through a crack in the door. He covered me with apologies and a bath-robe; but I did not mind either, for as the barmaid ran back to the inn she was laughing what I still insist upon believing to have been the simple joyous laughter of the Middle Ages. But we must hurry to get back to college in time for dinner. And even at that we shall have to stop here at Magdalen bridge and give a street boy sixpence to take the punt the rest of the way. We land at the foot of the tower just as the late afternoon sun is gilding its exquisite pinnacles, and the chimes in its belfry are playing the prelude to the hour of seven. It is a melody worth all the Char and the Isis, with all their weirs and their willows. Other mediæval chimes fill you with a delicious sorrow for the past; but when they cease, and the great bell tolls out the hour, you think only of the death of time. It leaves you sadly beneath the tower, in the musty cellarage. But the melody that the Magdalen chimes utter is full of the fervid faith, the aspirations, of our fathers. It lifts you among the gilded pinnacles, or perhaps ever so little above them. II AS SEEN FROM AN OXFORD TUB To the true slacker, the college barges that line the Isis are an object of aversion, for into them sooner or later every fellow who loves the water finds his way, and then there is an end of slacking. Each of the barges is a grammar school of oarsmanship, where all available men are taught everything, from what thickness of leather to wear on the heels of their boating-shoes to the rhythm in rowing by which alone an eight can realize its full speed; and from the barges issues a navy of boats and boating-men more than ten times as large as that of an American university. When Mr. R. C. Lehmann arrived at Cambridge to coach the Harvard crew, he was lost in admiration of the Charles River and the Back Bay, and in amazement at the absence of boats on them. At either Yale or Harvard it would be easy to give space to both of the fleets that now swarm on the slender Isis and threadlike Cam. We have water enough--as a Congressman once remarked of our fighting navy--it is only the boats that are lacking. The lesson we have to learn of our English cousins is not so much a matter of reach and swing, outrigger and blades, as a generous and wholesome interest in boating for the sake of the boat and of the water; and it is less apparent in an Oxford 'varsity eight than in the humblest tub of the humblest college.