Taffy thanked him and walked across the great empty quadrangle.  Within the Cathedral the organ was sounding and pausing, and from time to time a boy’s voice broke in upon the music like a flute, the pure treble rising to the roof as though it were the very voice of the building, and every pillar sustained its petition, “Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law!” Neither organist nor chorister was visible, and Taffy tiptoed along the aisles in dread of disturbing them.  For the moment this voice adoring in the noble building expressed to him the completest, the most perfect thing in life.  All his own boyish handiwork, remember, under his father’s eye had been guided toward the worship of God.

“. . . And incline our hearts to keep this law.”  The music ceased.  He heard the organist speaking, up in the loft; criticising, no doubt:  and it reminded him somehow of the small sounds of home and his mother moving about her housework in the hush between breakfast and noon.

He stepped out into the sunlight again, and wandering through archway and cloister found himself at length beyond the college walls and at the junction of two avenues of elms, between the trunks of which shone the acres of a noble meadow, level and green.  The avenues ran at a right angle, east and south; the one old, with trees of magnificent girth, the other new and interset with poplars.

Taffy stood irresolute.  One of these avenues, he felt sure, must lead to the river; but which?

Two old gentlemen stepped out from the wicket of the Meadow Buildings, and passed him, talking together.  The taller—­a lean man, with a stoop—­was clearly a clergyman.  The other wore cap and gown, and Taffy remarked, as he went by, that his cap was of velvet; and also that he walked with his arms crossed just above the wrists, his right hand clutching his left cuff, and his left hand his right cuff, his elbows hugged close to his sides.

After a few paces the clergyman paused, said something to his companion, and the two turned back towards the boy.

“Were you wanting to know your way?”

“I was looking for the river,” Taffy answered.  He was thinking that he had never in his life seen a face so full of goodness.

“Then this is your first visit to Oxford?  Suppose, now, you come with us? and we will take you by the river and tell you the names of the barges.  There is not much else to see, I’m afraid, in Vacation time.”

He glanced at his companion in the velvet cap, who drew down an extraordinary bushy pair of eyebrows (yet he, too, had a beautiful face) and seemed to come out of a dream.

“So much the better, boy, if you come up to Oxford to worship false gods.”

Taffy was taken aback.

“Eight false gods in little blue caps, seated in a trough and tugging at eight poles; and all to discover if they can get from Putney to Mortlake sooner than eight others in little blue caps of a lighter shade.  What do they do at Mortlake when they get there in such a hurry?  Eh, boy?”