It was "at our city of Oxford" that we chanced upon this letter. Reading in the Bodleian Library, at the end of the great cross gallery lined with rows of books, tier upon tier, we sat in the month of September, 1884, at a quiet table beside a huge stone-mullioned window. One of its casements of leaded panes, guarded with brown rusty iron bars, was open. In the acacia-tree outside a bird was singing. Beyond the delicate green foliage, untouched by any thought of autumn, the towers and spires of the glorious city rose above red and gray roofs. The silence about us was only broken by the crisp turning of leaves or the stealthy foot-fall of the attendants bringing fresh heaps of books to the half-dozen busy workers. There was a fragrant smell of old books--of leather bindings--so dear to the student's heart. The warm, sweet outer air and hot sunshine streamed in at the open window. "The merry, merry Christ Church bells--one, two, three, four, five, six," chimed the quarters; and "Mighty Tom" tolled the hours as the morning stole by only too quickly. Two hundred and eighteen years ago in this very month of September, Queen Elizabeth was at Oxford, on her way to or from Kenilworth Castle, and she wrote the letter to Lady Hobby with those same Christ Church bells chiming the quarters and the hours within hearing of her lodgings. What times those were! The fortunes of England under Elizabeth were recovering from long disgrace and decay. The foundation of the Royal Exchange, by Sir Thomas Gresham, in that very year 1566, gave English trade an impetus of which we in England and America are reaping the benefits. English ships under such men as Drake and Frobisher, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, were sailing the seas, fighting the Spaniards, and bringing home the wealth of every country in the known globe to the port of London. A few years later, Drake in his little vessel with eighty men would sail through the straits of Magellan, and load his bark with gold-dust and silver ingots, with pearls, diamonds and emeralds, the spoils of the "great galleon that sailed once a year from Lima to Cadiz," and Raleigh would name Virginia after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.