Oxford is an excellent place for seeing illustrious visitors from all parts of the world. It is the cynosure of all Americans, and it is strange to see how many travellers know all about the beauties of Oxford, and seem often to be quite unaware of the similar, nay, in some respects greater, beauties of Cambridge. There is only one drawback. Most travellers come to Oxford during the Long Vacation, and during the Long Vacation most professors naturally go away. In that way I have missed seeing some people whose acquaintance I should have highly valued. I thus lost the pleasure of showing the late Emperor of Brazil the historical sights of Oxford, being absent when he passed through. He saw everything in a marvellously short time, but then he was up sight-seeing at five in the morning. However, I made his acquaintance afterwards in Switzerland. We were staying at an out-of-the-way place at Gimmelwald, and one day about five in the morning there was a loud knock at my bedroom door. The whole wooden cottage trembled. When I got up to see what was the matter, I saw my friend Mr. Ralston, standing breathless on the staircase and saying, “The Emperor of Brazil wants to see you. He is staying at Interlaken, and has persuaded the Empress to stay another day to see you. But you must get up at once and take a carriage and drive to Interlaken.” I did so, and was with the Emperor and Empress soon after breakfast. The Empress and the gentlemen-in-waiting were not in the best of humours on account of this unexpected delay in their journey. We had a long and undisturbed talk in a private room. I was sorry the Emperor would speak French, though, having been at school in Switzerland, he spoke German quite as well. He was full of questions about Sanskrit literature and the Vedic religion. I was amazed at his knowledge, for he had actually begun to study Sanskrit, and was fully aware of all the difficulties that had to be met before we could hope to gain an insight into the heart of the ancient religion of the Vedic Rishis. He had a young German with him who acted as his tutor in Sanskrit, and likewise in Hebrew. It was very pleasant to be examined by a man who really knew what questions to ask, and who was bent on finding out by himself what the “Rig Veda,” the most ancient of all the books in the world, really contained. Like many others he seemed to expect too much, and I had to tell him he must not be disappointed, and that, though the Veda was certainly the oldest book in the proper sense of that word, which had been preserved to us in an almost miraculous manner, still it bore already traces of a long growth, nay, even of a long decay of religious thought. If the Vedic poets were different from what we expected them to be, it was our fault, not theirs. They showed us what the world was like in the second millennium B.C., and if we thought that there was in that millennium much that sounds childish and absurd to us, it was well that we should know that fact,