The carpenter’s and innkeeper’s tenants found themselves suddenly powerful and rich. They had their own seal, and a new and more settled enthusiasm, and a diapason of duties and ceremonies, added to their life. They had their aisle in the church whose shadow reached them on summer evenings. If their estates were large and well managed,--if the country was prosperous, and the head obeyed the statutes and the fellows the head,--their progress was swift. Perhaps a legal difficulty interposed delay, or their rents disappeared. Perhaps the fellows quarrelled with the head, or the discipline was such that the fellows climbed into college at late unstatutable hours and became a scandal in the University. But a descendant or neighbour of the founder, or a parishioner of the college living, came to their help. One gave a present, in order that he might be remembered in the college prayers: another sent books: a former fellow who was grateful or pitiful made a rich benefaction when he went to court. Already the little original tenements were tottering or too small. They must build and rebuild. Then a “second founder” adopted as his children that and all succeeding generations of scholars, who should praise him for a benefaction larger than the first. They pull down the old buildings, all save a flanking wall with a gateway to their taste, and begin to build. The benefactor sends teams of oxen to carry wood and stone. They are quarrying at Eynsham and Headington, and in the benefactor’s own distant county. They are felling oaks at Cumnor or Nuneham, actually before the bronzed foliage has crisped to brown. All day the oxen come and go: on the river, the boats are carrying stone, slates, and wood, unless the frost binds the barges among the reeds and the foundation soil breaks the spade. The master mason has already roughly hewn a statue of the patron saint or the founder, or his [Illustration: THE LIBRARY, ORIEL COLLEGE Across the picture, opposite the spectator, appears the Library, a dignified building of the Ionic order of architecture, designed by James Wyatt about 1788. It occupies the northern side of the inner quadrangle. On the ground floor, in the rusticated “basement” upon which the Library stands, are the Common Rooms of the College. The time is late afternoon in summer.]