Another mile, and the heights of Nuneham close in on the left with woods sweeping down to the very edge of the water. Presently one comes upon a little island, connected with the Nuneham side by an intensely rustic bridge. By the landing-place is a cottage with exaggerated thatch. Here they make tea. They make most not for the University picnics that the summer term brings to these hospitable woods, but when the great revolt of the town sets in with the long vacation. The river is as populous as ever then with dashing young fellows in flannel, and enchanting young ladies dressed in the depth of fashion. Great and many barges are towed down to Nuneham, and there merry people dance round Carfax, and float up again to Salter's in the heavy purple dusk, trolling snatches of songs. Carfax reminds us what a place of shifting Nuneham is. To begin with, the family was removed hither from Stanton Harcourt in the last century; then they moved the church and the village to new places; then the river was moved into a new cut, and the town of Oxford presented Lord Harcourt with Otho Nicholson's conduit. It was a work that gave the town the final accent of the Jacobean style; but it was in the way of cabs. May one hope that perhaps it came to Nuneham, like other pilgrims from Oxford, only for a season, and that it is waiting in that hospitable retreat till its home is worthy of it again? [Illustration: THE BRIDGE AND COTTAGE, NUNEHAM.] The conduit did good service to Nuneham at the time. It took the place of a projected "Gothic castle." Gothic castles and abbeys, well ruined, were in vogue, to cap a rising ground or to conceal a dairy. It was the time of "landscape gardening." People corrected their land as much as possible after the ideas of Claude. It is for his pictures one must look in grounds like those of Nuneham. The trim Elizabethan garden, with its pleasaunce and mount, and bowling-green and wilderness, its fountains and clipped trees, give place to a carefully-arranged disorder. Foregrounds were picturesquely grouped, middle distances were plotted, and sunk fences, palings painted green, grottoes with stalactites and stalagmites and other devices went to make up what was called Nature. The disciple of Rousseau felt that he had indeed returned when he could sit upon a jag of extremely difficult geology fresh from the contractor's hand, and drop the tear of sensibility into the cascade that his own fingers had turned on. The man who had the chief hand in the laying out of Nuneham was Lancelot Brown, called "Capability;" but Lord Harcourt kept, besides, two tame poets, Mason, the author of "The English Garden," and Whitehead, the Laureate, to help him to be elaborately natural in his gardening, and to write verses on the seats. The two had a genuine contempt for one another. Mason had the last word. He wrote the verses on Whitehead's memorial urn. He said--