_Another_ fatal accident! What days we are living in. Yesterday afternoon some undergraduates were shooting crows with saloon pistols about Magdalen Walks, when one of them got shot through the stomach and died almost at once. He was an Exeter man. We are all in black and white at the House, and _very_ sad and depressed. Last night a number of us dined at the "Mitre," so as to keep away from the House. It was a strange meal--much noisy talk and a good deal drunk, but every now and then came long miserable pauses, and talk about Marriott in low, frightened tones. Afterwards they came down to my rooms for coffee, and as we sat here we could hear the passing bell tolling from St. Aldate's. Some, almost in desperation, rushed off to the billiard-room and played pool in a gloomy sort of way. It was anything to keep away out of the House. I assure you the gloom and misery of it all are excessive. I hear men saying that they simply _dare_ not die. {66} I do feel that Mr. Capel will find men here not unprepared to listen to him. _Left to themselves_, they are evidently making desperate efforts to forget it all.... I had seen him lying in the ground-floor room where he died--totally unconscious, and breathing with great difficulty. The Senior Censor came in when I was there, and read over him the prayers for the dying. This was the very clergyman who told me a few months ago that he did not believe in prayer.... I went into the room again after the men had gone to the billiard-room. It was the room of a friend of his: the walls covered with pictures of horses and actresses, and whips and spurs and pipes. The body lay on a mattress on the floor, covered with a sheet. It was all dreadful, and I tried in vain in that room to say a _De Profundis_ for him. As I went out I met men coming in carrying the coffin. A letter three days later gives an account of the funeral: Oxford, _May_ 18. We all assembled in the cathedral, in mourning, at 2.30 p.m. The Dean read the funeral service, making repeated and most painful slips of the tongue. Then the choir sang a really lovely anthem, "In the sight of the unwise he seemed to die, but he is at peace." All were much moved; and the man next me was, I think, crying, as indeed I was myself. We walked in procession, two and two, to Peck., then formed a lane to Canterbury Gate, through which the hearse passed, his friends following it down to the station. All in profound silence, broken only by the tramp of feet and the tolling of the bell. Everything inky black, except as much of the Dean's surplice as a huge black scarf and stole let be seen. The coffin was all black, with no cross {67} or anything else to relieve it. I heard great disgust expressed at the godless gloom of it all.