“I—­I’m sure I don’t know,” stammered Taffy.

The clergyman broke out laughing, and turned to him.  “Are you going to tell us your name?”

“Raymond, sir.  My father used to be at Christ Church.”

“What?  Are you Sam Raymond’s son?”

“You knew my father?”

“A very little.  I was his senior by a year or two.  But I know something about him.”  He turned to the other.  “Let me introduce the son of a man after your own heart—­of a man fighting for God in the wilds, and building an altar there with his own hands and by the lamp of sacrifice.”

“But how do you know all this?” cried Taffy.

“Oh,” the old clergyman smiled, “we are not so ignorant up here as you suppose.”

They walked by the river bank, and there Taffy saw the college barges and was told the name of each.  Also he saw a racing eight go by:  it belonged to the Vacation Rowing Club.  From the barges they turned aside and followed the windings of the Cherwell.  The clergyman did most of the talking; but now and then the old gentleman in the velvet cap interposed a question about the church at home, its architecture, the materials it was built of, and so forth; or about Taffy’s own work, his carpentry, his apprenticeship with Mendarva the Smith.  And to all these questions the boy found himself replying with an ease which astonished him.

Suddenly the old clergyman said, “There is your College!”

And unperceived by Taffy a pair of kindly eyes watched his own as they met the first vision of that lovely tower rising above the trees and (so like a thing of life it seemed) lifting its pinnacles exultantly into the blue heaven.

“Well?”

All three had come to a halt.  The boy turned, blushing furiously.

“This is the best of all, sir.”

“Boy,” said old Velvet-cap, “do you know the meaning of ‘edification’?  There stands your lesson for four years to come, if you can learn it in that time.  Do you think it easy?  Come and see how it has been learnt by men who have spent their lives face to face with it.”

They crossed the street by Magdalen bridge, and passed under Pugin’s gateway, by the Chapel door and into the famous cloisters.  All was quiet here; so quiet that even the voices of the sparrows chattering in the ivy seemed but a part of the silence.  The shadow of the great tower fell across the grass.

“This is how one generation read the lesson.  Come and see how another, and a later, read it.”

A narrow passage led them out of gloom into sudden sunlight; and the sunlight spread itself on fair grass-plots and gravelled walks, flower-beds and the pale yellow facade of a block of buildings in the classical style, stately and elegant, with a colonnade which only needed a few promenading figures in laced coats and tie-wigs to complete the agreeable picture.

“What do you make of that?”