sweetest obituaries I ever meet, but I have never known you to pronounce them over the deceased.” Here glow the lamps, And teaspoons clatter to the cosy hum Of scientific circles. Here resounds The football field with its discordant train, The crowd that cheers but not discriminates.... There are also teas with the young, the beautiful, and the virtuous in the plain and exclusive northernmost haunts of learning in Oxford. The University could not well do without their sweet influences. Yet if men, in their company, are often better than themselves, as is only right, they are perhaps less than themselves. Also, in wit carnivals, it is permitted to women to use all kinds of weapons, from a sigh to a tea-urn; to men they are not permitted, although they have nothing sharper or more rankling in their armoury. Hence, on the part of generous women, a sort of pity, and on the part of men some timidity and (short of rudeness) tergiversation. And I am not privileged to give an account of a real Somerville tea. But it is a thing impossible to praise in rhyme or prose the pleasures of tea at Oxford--perhaps especially in autumn, as the sun is setting after rain--when a man knows not whether it is pleasanter to be rained upon at Cumnor, or to be dried again by his fire--and the bells are ringing. Not that Nepenthes which the wife of Thone In Egypt gave to Jove-born Helena, Is of such power to stir up joy as this, To life so friendly. Perhaps, as you light candles, and ask, “What is warmth without light?” your companion replies, “A minor poet”; and when you ask again in irritation, “What is light without warmth?” he is ready with, “An edition of Tennyson with notes.” And not even the recollection of such things and worse can spoil the charm of Oxford tea. Then it is that the homeliness of Oxford is dearest. And what a carnival of contrasts in men and manners can be seen in a little room. “Oxford,” writes the _Oxford Spectator_,--