"_... and incline our hearts to keep this law._" The music ceased. He heard the organist speaking, up in the loft; criticising, no doubt: and it reminded him somehow of the small sounds of home and his mother moving about her house-work in the hush between breakfast and noon. He stepped out into the sunlight again, and wandering through archway and cloister found himself at length beyond the college walls and at the junction of two avenues of elms, between the trunks of which shone the acres of a noble meadow, level and green. The avenues ran at a right angle, east and south; the one old, with trees of magnificent girth, the other new and interset with poplars. Taffy stood irresolute. One of these avenues, he felt sure, must lead to the river; but which? Two old gentlemen stepped out from the wicket of the Meadow Buildings, and passed him, talking together. The taller—a lean man, with a stoop—was clearly a clergyman. The other wore cap and gown, and Taffy remarked, as he went by, that his cap was of velvet; and also that he walked with his arms crossed just above the wrists, his right hand clutching his left cuff, and his left hand his right cuff, his elbows hugged close to his sides. After a few paces the clergyman paused, said something to his companion, and the two turned back toward the boy. "Were you wanting to know your way?" "I was looking for the river," Taffy answered. He was thinking that he had never in his life seen a face so full of goodness. "Then this is your first visit to Oxford? Suppose, now, you come with us? and we will take you by the river and tell you the names of the barges. There is not much else to see, I'm afraid, in Vacation time." He glanced at his companion in the velvet cap, who drew down an extraordinarily bushy pair of eyebrows (yet he, too, had a beautiful face) and seemed to come out of a dream. "So much the better, boy, if you come up to Oxford to worship false gods." Taffy was taken aback. "Eight false gods in little blue caps, seated in a trough and tugging at eight poles: and all to discover if they can get from Putney to Mortlake sooner than eight other false gods in little blue caps of a lighter shade! What do they do at Mortlake when they get there in such a hurry? Eh, boy?" "I—I'm sure I don't know," stammered Taffy. The clergyman broke out laughing, and turned to him. "Are you going to tell us your name?" "Raymond, sir. My father used to be at Christ Church." "What? Are you Sam Raymond's son?" "You knew my father?" "A very little. I was his senior by a year or two. But I know something about him." He turned to the other. "Let me introduce the son of a man after your own heart—of a man fighting for God in the wilds, and building an altar there with his own hands and by the lamp of sacrifice." "But how do you know all this?" cried Taffy. "Oh," the old clergyman smiled, "we are not so ignorant up here as you suppose."