The Bantam’s room and mine were next door to one another in Augustine’s Quad; fires were burning in the grates to bid us welcome. The scout, who acted as guide, seized the opportunity to sell us each a second-hand tin bath, a coal-scuttle, and a kettle at very much more than their first-hand prices. We felt no resentment. His deferential manner was worth the extra. Just as we had commenced unpacking, the bell began to toll. We slipped on our gowns and followed the throng into a vaulted, dimly-lighted hall, where we dined at long tables off ancient silver, and had beer set before us. Surely we were men! That night the Bantam and I sat far into the small, cold hours of the morning; there was no one to worry us to go to bed. When the Bantam had left, I lay awake in a state of bewildered ecstasy. I had become aware in the last ten hours of my unchartered personality. I realized that my life was my own to command, to make or mar. As the bells above the sleeping city rang out time’s progress, all the pageant of the lads of other ages, who had come up to Oxford star-eyed, as I had come, passed before me. When the withered leaves tapped against the walls, I could fancy that it was their footfall. They had come with a chance equal to mine; at the end of a few years they had departed. Some had succeeded and some had failed. Of all that great army which now stretched bivouacked throughout eternity, only the latest recruits were in sight. The scholar-monks, the soldier-saints, the ruffian-students of early centuries, the cavaliers, the philosophers, and the statesmen, together with the roisterers of the rank and file, were all equally and completely gone. In the silence of my narrow room, with the flickering fire dying in the hearth, there brooded over me the shadowy darkness of the ages. What religion does for some men, for me the gray poetry of this poignant city accomplished. I had become aware that from henceforth the ultimate responsibility for my actions must rest forever with myself. I was strangely unafraid of this knowledge. They were dim dawn-days that followed, when the air was filled with star-dust--neither with suns, nor moons, nor stars, only with the excitement of their promise. My world was at twilight, blurred and mysterious; only the huge design was clearly discernible--the cracks and imperfections were concealed from me, shrouded in dusk. I lived in a land of ideals, drawing my rules of conduct from the realism of the classics--a realism which even to the Greeks and Romans was only an aspiration, never a practice. Existence had for me all the piquant fascination which comes of half-knowledge--the charming allurement, leaving room for speculation, which the glimpse of a girl’s face has at nightfall. It was an age when all things seemed possible, because all were untested.