Nor in our consideration of the glories of this beloved old city must we forget the River—for no one in the place forgets it. Perhaps we should not speak of _the_ River, for Oxford is the fortunate possessor of two, standing as it does in the fork created by the flowing together of the Thames and the Cherwell. The Thames, as we have already seen, flows thither from the west, while the Cherwell makes its way southwards from Edgehill; and, though we are accustomed to think of the Thames as the main stream, the geologists, whose business it is to make a close study of the earth’s surface, tell us that the Cherwell is in reality the more important of the two; that down its valley in the far-away past flowed a great river which with the Kennet was the ancestor of the present-day River; that the tributary Thames has grown so much that it has been able to capture and take over as its own the valley of the Cherwell from Oxford onwards to Reading. But that, of course, is a story of the very dim past, long before the days of history. The Cherwell is a very pretty little stream, shaded by overhanging willows and other trees, so that it is usually the haunt of pleasure, the place where the undergraduate takes his own or somebody else’s sister for an afternoon’s excursion, or where he makes his craft fast in the shade in order that he may enjoy an afternoon’s quiet reading. A walk through the meadows on its banks is, indeed, something very pleasant, with the stream on one side of us and that most beautiful of colleges, Magdalen, on the other. Here as we proceed down the famous avenue of pollard willows, winding between two branches of the stream, we can hear almost continuously the singing of innumerable birds, for the Oxford gardens and meadows form a veritable sanctuary in which live feathered friends of every sort.