And our own beautiful English, the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton: will that not suffer if a false utilitarianism should succeed in banishing the classics from our schools? Even now it is surrounded by enemies, but I shudder to think of what it might become after two centuries of nothing but trans-oceanic influences unchecked by scholarship. It was a bitterly cold winter, long spoken of as the Crimean winter, which was ushered in by January, 1855. In Wales as elsewhere it was so cold that many birds and beasts were frozen to death, and one day in my tutor’s garden I caught a live woodcock in my hand. The poor creature was at the last gasp, dying of starvation. For many scores of miles round there was no moist cranny into which it could insert its long beak for food. The earth was like iron. Death and misery everywhere in these islands, and it was terrible to get the news from the Crimea, where hundreds of our poor, starving, shivering soldiers were in little better plight than the wild creatures at home. How they suffered! and how nobly patient they were! During the dark months there was not much to be done beyond taking long, solitary walks in the midst of that glorious scenery; Diphwys behind us, the Barmouth river and Cader Idris in all its majesty in front of us. Barmouth itself a little tiny fishing village. It would have been a dull time if Jelf had not clapped spurs into me and filled me with a new-born ambition, and a certain measure of that belief in myself without which there is no hope. And I did work! When the spring came it brought with it an invitation to Jelf to act as examiner in the final schools at Oxford. He was very anxious to accept this, for he loved keeping up the connection with his old university, so he proposed to me that I should finish up the last two or three weeks with him at Christ Church, where his brother, the principal of King’s College, who was a Canon, had lent him his house. My father raised no objection, and I, of course, was delighted, for I knew that among the undergraduates I should find many old friends. I am grateful for the memory of those days, for never again in after years did Oxford exercise upon me the same fascination that it possessed at that time; I was very young, and very impressionable. Indeed in a way it seemed as if I then was under an influence which, when I came back some months later, had died away.