The summer term at Oxford would be even more pleasant than it is if it did not start in April and finish when the summer is just beginning. I do not wish to say anything about weather, but without taking an interest in the abnormal quantities of rain or wanting to know why the sun shines so seldom, I do think that if the success of a term depends largely upon an English May, it is apt to be very limited. I have been told so often by quite truthful men that there are other people besides undergraduates to be considered in Oxford, that I have never felt so convinced about anything, except that Queen Anne is dead; but all the same it seems to me that the undergraduate is not given a chance of being comfortably warm for any length of time. And if the authorities who fix the terms, or if they like it better, the academical year, would understand that an undergraduate is a far nicer man when he is comfortable, they might be inclined to cease from compelling him to play cricket when it is impossible to think of anything but the biting wind. For my own part I am certain that I have never wanted to break rules or windows when the sun shines, but some men, when they become depressed by the weather, turn their thoughts to throwing things about, and there are so many windows in a quad that wherever you throw you seem to hit one of them. The only window I smashed was not entirely my fault, for Ward ducked his head just as a tennis-ball was going to hit it; the Subby, however, who was trying to instil logic into a lot of pass "mods" men, was annoyed by broken glass falling into his lecture-room. This was a bad beginning to the summer term, but had it not rained for nearly two days I should have been playing cricket that morning, and if Ward's head had happened to be in front of the Subby's lecture-room I should not have been there to throw at it. I tried to explain this to the Subby, but there is a certain kind of reasoning which does not make much impression on either dons or schoolmasters. I asked him if he thought any man who was booked to play cricket all day could sit down at once and work when he heard that his match was scratched, and he answered, "Undoubtedly." The Subby was a nice enough man in some ways, but in others he was simply hopeless. He was not so absolutely unapproachable as Mr. Edwardes, for although you had got to imagine for all you were worth you could think of him as an "undergrad," but when Murray and I tried to persuade ourselves that Mr. Edwardes had once been only twenty years old we wasted our time, and Murray told me that I was always trying to do impossible things.