When Mr. Keble went down to his curacy at Southrop, at the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823,[23] Hurrell went with him to read for his B.A. degree, which he took in December of that year. The summer was to him, as to one of his companions there, Isaac Williams, the turning-point in his career. In those tranquil fields and winding roads and the solemn little village Church, where he found ‘a man wholly made up of love, and religion a reality,’ Hurrell began to see the Last Things: he never could forget the place, the person, and the occasion which meant so much to him in the Providence of God. His third companion, Robert Wilberforce, ‘did not feel towards Keble,’ wrote Isaac Williams, ‘as we did at that time, having been brought up in an opposite school.’ In all the fresh and brave happinesses of nature and of grace which were round Keble like an aureole wherever he went, Hurrell brightened and strengthened visibly. ‘You are my Spring: and when you smile, I grow.’ He learned from him to follow conscience and to fear applause. As soon as he parted from Mr. Keble, their long correspondence began, and the home-loving pupil was proud indeed when the ‘first man in Oxford,’ as Newman enthusiastically called him, came on a visit to Dartington. We know from recent testimony of a delightful pen[24] how dear the neighbourhood became to Mr. Keble, and how often he would wander away from the animated household of his friends to the fourteenth-century priest’s-house hard by at Little Hempston, an almost unique survival, with its small quadrangle, its hall and solar, of Chaucer’s time. The lovely old Vicarage, in its still secluded situation, had taken captive Hurrell’s twenty-year old fancy, as a letter of 1823 to Mr. Keble shows.