Good came out of evil; for her story, which she rehearsed again and again, with all the energy and firm persuasion of truth, at last reached the ears of the parish authorities, and they, on inquiry into the evidence, forthwith decreed the addition of a shilling a-week to poor old Nanny’s allowance, on the plea that her faculties had quite failed her, and that she required greater charity because of her wandering mind. Yet the fact which she testified met the criterion of evidence demanded by Hume, for the event occurred within the experience of the witness herself. It was by outbreaks of animal spirits such as these that the monotony of collegiate life in those days was relieved, for the University supplied but little excitement of mental kind. The battle-cries of High Church and Low Church--“that bleating of the sheep and that lowing of the oxen” which nowadays we hear--had not yet begun to rouse the Oxford mind;[123] and the only war about vestments that I recollect was our hot fierce struggle after a festive assembly to get first out into the lobby, and to grasp as a spoil the best caps and gowns one by one, until the unhappy freshman who arrived last had to put up with such ragged specimens of University costume as would hardly have satisfied the veriest Puritan for the performance of divine service. Well, for us two--the subjects of this paper--the life of Oxford, with its freaks and its discipline, for a time was over; we had each passed the final examination so graphically named “the Great Go;” and that so as to be, what man so seldom is in this world, satisfied. In high heart, and with spirits running over, my friend and I appointed a tryst in a small watering-place on the north coast of Cornwall as a starting-point for a ride “all down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss.” In due time, and on a glorious summer day, we mounted our “Galloway nags,” and, like the knights of ancient ballad, “we laughed as we rode away.” The start was from Bude, and we made our first halt at a place twelve miles towards the south-west; a scene of general local renown, and which bears the parochial name of Warbstow Barrow. It stands upon a lofty hill that soars and swells upward into a vast circular mound, enthroned, as it were, amid a wild and boundless stretch of heathy and gorsy moorland. It was soothing to the sight to look down and around on the tapestry of purple and gold intermingled in natural woof, and flowing away in free undulation on every side. The view from this mountain-top was of wonderful extent, but wild, desolate, and bare. Beneath, on three sides, spread the moor, dotted here and there with a grey old church, that crouched toward the shadow of its low Saxon battlemented tower, as if it still sought shelter, after so many ages, from the perils of surrounding barbarism. On the fourth side swelled the sea. But the brow of this hill, like that of many others in the west, dropped into the shape of a mighty circular