Finally they came to the treadmill, and as no prisoners were on it, some of the jury expressed a wish to try it; one of the jurymen seeing my brother, who was the only child present, kindly took him on and held him by the hand.  When all were in position the wheel was started slowly, and as one step went down they mounted the next, and so on up the stairs, but they never got to the top!  The steps creaked under them as the wheel turned slowly round, and a prison officer stood behind them with a big stick, which he was careful not to use on any of the jurymen, though my brother heard him say he had to use it sometimes on the prisoners.  As the wheel turned round it moved some kind of machinery which they could not see.

[Illustration:  GREAT TOM BELL, OXFORD.]

But to return to Oxford again.  We were not suspected of being concerned in the murder, nor did we venture to inquire whether the culprit had been found, for fear that we might be suspected of being concerned in the case; but if a police raid had been made on the Oxford Temperance Hotel—­most unlikely thing to happen—­we should have been able to produce a good record for that day, at any rate, for we attended four different services in four different places of worship.  The first was at Christ Church, whither we had been advised to go to listen to the choir, whose singing at that time was considered to be the best in Oxford.  Certainly the musical part of the service was all that could be desired.  There were more than twenty colleges at Oxford, and we had a busy day, for between the services we looked through the “Quads,” with their fine gardens and beautiful lawns, hundreds of years old.  In the services, every phase of religious thought in the Church of England seemed to be represented—­the High Church, the Low Church, and the Broad Church; and many men in all vocations and professions in life had passed through the colleges, while valuable possessions had been bequeathed to them from time to time, until Oxford had become a veritable storehouse of valuable books, pictures, and relics of all kinds, and much of the history of the British Empire seemed to have been made by men who had been educated there.  It would have taken us quite a week to see Oxford as it ought to be seen, but we had only this one day, and that a Sunday.

[Illustration:  TOM TOWER, WITH WOLSEY STATUE.]

Christ Church, where we went to our first service, one of the finest buildings in Oxford, was founded by the great Wolsey in the reign of Henry VIII.  It contains the statue and portrait of the Cardinal, and in the Library his Cardinal’s Hat, also his Prayer Book—­one of its most valued possessions, beautifully illuminated and bound in crimson velvet set with pearls and dated 1599.  The famous bell of Christ Church, known as the “Great Tom,” weighing about 17,000 lbs., is tolled every night at five minutes past nine o’clock—­101 times, that being the original number of the students at the college—­and at its solemn sound most of the colleges and halls closed their gates.  The students were formerly all supposed to be housed at that hour, but the custom is not now observed—­in fact, there was some doubt about it even in the time of Dean Aldrich, the author of the well-known catch, “Hark! the bonny Christ Church bells,” published in 1673: