the University; in most instances pieces, either bestowed or given by special benefactors: the Communion vessels of the Colleges were not taken by the king--a loyal son of the Church. Six colleges, among them Wadham, retained theirs through all the confusion of the war, and still possess them. In February 1643 warning came of fresh troubles from the north: three Commissioners representing the nobility, clergy, gentry, and commons of Scotland presented themselves to the king, "to press his Majestie that the Church of England might be made conformable in all points to the Church of Scotland." To Charles, himself a Scot, this request must have seemed an outrageous insult, inflicted on him by those of his own household, and an omen of his desertion by his warlike countrymen, whom, despite their resistance to the English Liturgy, he trusted to be faithful to a Stuart. On June 24, 1646, the last fighting Royalist left Oxford. In the following Michaelmas, Wood returned "to the home of his nativitie." He found Oxford "empty as to scholars, but pretty well replenished with Parliamentarian soldiers." In his opinion the young men of the city and the University had reaped less benefit from the Royalist occupation than their seniors; the latter had gained "great store of wealth from the court and royalists that had for several years continued among them"; the former he "found many of them to have been debauched by bearing arms, and doing the duties belonging to soldiers, as watching, warding, and sitting in tipling houses for whole nights together." Nor were the spiritual teachers sent by Parliament to restore good manners and religion, in Wood's opinion, fitted for their mission: they were six Presbyterian Ministers, "two of them fooles, two knaves, two madmen." With the history of Oxford for the next eighteen months, important and interesting though it is, we are not concerned. The scholars returned slowly to the half-empty colleges, where admissions had dwindled almost to vanishing point. At Wadham, for instance, the admissions in 1643 were only seven; in 1644, three; in 1645, none; in 1646, seven; in 1647, when the worst of the fighting was over, they rose to nineteen. The Independents and the Presbyterians were now in possession of Oxford. In spite of both oppressors the undergraduates, of Wood's College at least, enjoyed themselves, as undergraduates do in the darkest times, and played "high jinks" on Candlemas Day, compelling the freshmen "to speake some pretty apothegme or make a jest or bull," or take strange oaths "over an old shoe," and suffer indignities if they were shy or stupid. "Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurrit." CHAPTER III. WILKINS' WARDENSHIP.