The cloistered Oxford gardens, with their incredibly smooth grass, were unchanged, but the immemorial quiet is broken. Your Oxford is a new Oxford, awake, struggling, suffering, nursing the wounded, while the noblest of her sons follow you to the war. Thinking of all these things as I walk, I decide not to go to the house, after all; there is a sound of hammering and an air of disquiet. I cross the little stone bridge and follow the stream; this, like the pony, is a new neighbour with which I must become acquainted, and it proves more friendly than that other. There is a touch of September gold everywhere, of autumn perfectness in things, that belies wrong anywhere upon the earth. And all the old days float down the stream; something, the way of the water with the grasses, the ripple of the water, brings back May, and my first English spring, and you. Do you remember that my very first glimpse of you was at the Union? You were debating, very convincingly, on the subject of disarmament, and proved the possibility, the practicability, of peace among nations. I was idly interested in you; Gladys had whispered that you were one of her friends. That night,--but never again,--you were just one of a type to me, with the fine, lean, English look of race, the fine self-control of every nerve and emotion and muscle. I noticed that you were already beginning to have a touch of the scholar stoop, and that you were a shade, just a shade, too slender. It was quite a surprise, and something of a blow to me, to find you English men not, on the whole, so stalwart as the men in America. All our lives we have read of the hale and hearty John Bull, yet our first glimpse of you makes us think that John Bull and Uncle Sam will have to change places in the caricatures if this transformation keeps on. The hardest thing in the world for me to understand is that the great things of life may hang on mere trifles. If I had not, acting on a moment's impulse, promised to go into lodgings with Gladys in Oxford because she would go there to study Celtic, Icelandic, and Greek, I should never have known you, never have walked with you in glory through an English spring, never have picked crocuses in Iffley meadows and anemones in Bagley wood, never have known that green rippling beauty of Oxford stream and meadow and the piercing joy of life and love that came with you. And now---- The vastness of my loss I can not even grasp; my world is swept away from under my feet, and I am alone, with nothing to stand on, nothing to reach in space. Dying myself could hardly mean such utter letting go; I am aware only of a great blankness. I have not even tried to measure my disaster, to understand. I shall have all the rest of my life to learn to understand; I come of a long-lived race.