They could not persuade him that, drunk or sober, he had rescued them from Banbury, that they would be glad of his further company. He turned once, after bidding them farewell, and glanced at Kit with his merry hazel eyes. "I’ve got that song of Banbury," he said. "It all came to me when I saw you dandling the gaoler with the blue-bottle nose. Strife and battle always helped the poets of a country, sir, since Homer’s time." "There goes a rogue," laughed Michael, listening to the man’s song of Banbury as he went chanting it up the rise. "Well, I’ve known worse folk, and he untied our hands." *CHAPTER IX.* *THE LOYAL CITY.* They jogged forward on the road, and the day grew hot with thunder. The slowness of a walking pace, after months in the saddle, the heat to which they were unused as yet, after the more chilly north, seemed to make a league of every mile. Then the storm burst, and out of nowhere a fierce wind leaped at them, driving the rain in sheets before it. The lightning played so near at times that they seemed to be walking through arrows of barbed fire. "A pleasant way of reaching Oxford, after all one’s dreams!" grumbled Kit. "Oh, it will lift. I’m always gayest in a storm, my lad. The end on’t is so near." The din and rain passed overhead. A league further on they stepped into clear sunlight and the song of soaring larks. Here, too, their walking ended, for a carrier overtook them. He had a light load and a strong, fast horse in the shafts; and, if their way of entry into the city of his dreams jarred on Kit’s sense of fitness, he was glad to have the journey shortened. The carrier pulled up at the gateway of St. John’s, and the wonder of their day began. Oxford, to men acquainted with her charm by daily intercourse, is constantly the City Beautiful; to these men of Yoredale, reared in country spaces, roughened by campaigning on the King’s behalf, it was like a town built high as heaven in the midst of fairyland. As they passed along the street, the confusion of so many streams of life, meeting and eddying back and mixing in one great swirling river, dizzied them for a while. Then their eyes grew clearer, and they saw it all with the freshness of a child’s vision. There were students, absurdly youthful and ridiculously light-hearted, so Kit thought in his mood of high seriousness. There were clergy, and market-women with their vegetables, hawkers, quack doctors, fortune-tellers, gentry and their ladies, prosperous, well-fed, and nicely clothed. A bishop and a dean rubbed shoulders with them as they passed. And, above the seemly hubbub of it all, the mellow sun shone high in an over-world of blue sky streaked with amethyst and pearl. "Was the dream worth while?" asked Michael, with his easy laugh. "A hundred times worth while. ’Twould have been no penance to walk every mile from Yoredale hither-to, for such an ending to the journey."