'Shall we get,' said I to Lady Torquilin, 'any glimpse of the High before we reach Boffin's?' Dear Lady Torquilin looked at me sternly, as if to discover some latent insincerity. 'None of your impertinence, miss,' said she; 'this is the High!' I was more charmed and delighted than I can express, and as Lady Torquilin fortunately remembered several things we urgently needed, and could buy to much better advantage in Oxford than in 'Town,' I had the great pleasure of finding out what it was like to shop in the High, and the other queer little streets which are permitted to run--no, to creep--about the feet of the great wise old colleges that take such kindly notice of them. It was very nice, to my mind, that huddling together of pastry-cooks and gargoyles, of chapels and old china shops, of battered mediæval saints and those little modern errand-boys with their handcarts--of old times and new, preponderatingly old and respectfully new. Much more democratic, too, than a seat of learning would be in America, where almost every college of reputation is isolated in the sea of 'grounds,' and the only sound that falls upon the academic ear is the clatter of the lawn-mower or the hissing of the garden-hose. Nor shall I soon forget the emotions with which I made a perfectly inoffensive purchase in a small establishment of wide reputation for petty wares, called, apparently from time immemorial, 'The Civet Cat'--not reproachfully, nor in a spirit of derision, but bearing the name with dignity in painted letters. People who know their way about Oxford will understand how we found ours to Pembroke from the High. I find that I have forgotten. We stood at so many corners to look, and Lady Torquilin bade me hurry on so often, that the streets and the colleges, and the towers and the gardens, are all lost to me in a crowded memory that diverges with the vagueness of enchantment from Carfax and Boffin's. But at last we walked out of the relative bustle of the highways and byways into the quietest place I ever saw or felt, except a graveyard in the Strand--a green square hedged in with buildings of great dignity and solidity, and very serious mind. I felt, as we walked around it to ask a respectable-looking man waiting about on the other side where Mr. Sanders Horton's rooms were, as if I were in church.