A great friend of Hughes and his circle, and a warm friend of the College, was James Russell Lowell, who, it will be remembered, was at one time American ambassador in this country—not the only American ambassador to whom the College owes a debt, for Mr. Choate at a later date gave us a notable address on Benjamin Franklin. I remember an annual gathering at which both Hughes and Lowell spoke. Hughes in his speech recalled the beginnings of the College and of the co-operative movement, the two having been closely associated with each other, and told the story of a certain brushmaker who had been a student of the College. The brushmaker had fallen on evil times, and his business had collapsed. Hughes and other co-operators and Christian Socialists clubbed together to set him up again, and in gratitude the brushmaker made them all brushes which, according to Hughes, had exceedingly hard bristles. Now Hughes had a most shiny bald head, and, with his eye on that head, Lowell, who spoke afterwards, in stately and measured terms, expressed a hope that all the students of the College did their work as thoroughly and effectively as the brushmaker had done his. On this same occasion Hughes referred to the fact that some time before Nathaniel Hawthorne had come to tea at the College. Again Lowell saw and took his opportunity. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘Mr. Hughes has made a slip; it cannot have been tea that my friend Hawthorne came to, for Hawthorne was a man of robuster fibre.’ I always think of Lowell as the most accomplished master of graceful English to whom I ever listened. I should never have heard or seen him, I should never have come across Llewelyn Davies or Tom Hughes, or many other men of mark in the world, had I not gone to the College. I went there, a young Oxford man, anxious to ‘do my bit,’ and thinking that I could confer benefits on others by teaching them. My experience is—and numbers of young University men have had the same experience—that I received infinitely more than I ever gave. Apart from friendships made for life, apart from having become, I hope, infected with the contagion of which I have spoken, simply and solely from the point of view of getting on in the world, it was a distinct gain to a young man to be thrown into association with great men or the intimate friends of great men, and to be constantly in an atmosphere of wide interests, high aims, and tolerant views. My start in the teaching line was even more unlucky than Tom Hughes’. Apparently he got some kind of class together, who then deserted him until he took to boxing. My recollection is that I put out an elaborate prospectus of what I was going to teach, and that no class turned up at all. Subsequently, however, I did manage to scrape together a small class, and supplemented teaching, not by boxing, but by becoming an active member of the Maurice Cricket Club, the President of which was Alfred Lyttelton, who, like Hughes, took a law class, but with much