As a matter of fact Taffy’s thoughts had run back to the theatre at Plymouth with its sudden changes of scenery.  And he stood for a moment while he collected them.

“It’s different:  I mean,” he added, feeling that this was intolerably lame, “it means something different; I cannot tell what.”

“It means the difference between godly fear and civil ease, between a house of prayer and one of no prayer.  It spells the moral change which came over this University when religion, the spring and source of collegiate life, was discarded.  The cloisters behind you were built for men who walked with God.”

“But why,” objected Taffy, plucking up courage, “couldn’t they do that in the sunlight?”

Velvet-cap opened his mouth.  The boy felt he was going to be denounced; when a merry laugh from the old clergyman averted the storm.

“Be content,” he said to his companion; “we are Gothic enough in Oxford nowadays.  And the lad is right too.  There was hope even for eighteenth-century Magdalen while its buildings looked on sunlight and on that tower.  You and the rest of us lay too much stress on prayer.  The lesson of that tower (with all deference to your amazing discernment and equally amazing whims) is not prayer, but praise.  And when all men unite to worship God, it’ll be praise, not prayer, that brings them together.

     “’Praise is devotion fit for noble minds,
       The differing world’s agreeing sacrifice.’”

“Oh, if you’re going to fling quotations from a tapster’s son at my head. . . .  Let me see . . . how does it go on? . . .  Where—­ something or other—­different faiths—­

     “‘Where Heaven divided faiths united finds. . . .’”

And in a moment the pair were in hot pursuit after the quotation, tripping each other up like two schoolboys at a game.  Taffy never forgot the final stanza, the last line of which they recovered exactly in the middle of the street, Velvet-cap standing between two tram-lines, right in the path of an advancing car, while he declaimed—­

     “’By penitence when we ourselves forsake,
      ’Tis but in wise design on piteous Heaven;
       In praise—­’”

(The gesture was magnificent)

     “’In praise we nobly give what God may take,
       And are without a beggar’s blush forgiven.’

“—­Confound these trams!”

The old clergyman shook hands with Taffy in some haste.  “And when you reach home give my respects to your father.  Stay, you don’t know my name.  Here is my card, or you’ll forget it.”

“Mine, too,” said Velvet-cap.

Taffy stood staring after them as they walked off down the lane which skirts the Botanical Gardens.  The names on the two cards were famous ones, as even he knew.  He walked back toward Trinity a proud and happy boy.  Half-way up Queen’s Lane, finding himself between blank walls, with nobody in sight, he even skipped.