I need not say that I left the English Cambridge with a heart full of all grateful and kindly emotions.

I must not forget that I found at Cambridge, very pleasantly established and successfully practising his profession, a former student in the dental department of our Harvard Medical School, Dr. George Cunningham, who used to attend my lectures on anatomy.  In the garden behind the quaint old house in which he lives is a large medlar-tree,—­the first I remember seeing.

On this same day we bade good-by to Cambridge, and took the two o’clock train to Oxford, where we arrived at half past five.  At this first visit we were to be the guests of Professor Max Mueller, at his fine residence in Norham Gardens.  We met there, at dinner, Mr. Herkomer, whom we have recently had with us in Boston, and one or two others.  In the evening we had music; the professor playing on the piano, his two daughters, Mrs. Conybeare and her unmarried sister, singing, and a young lady playing the violin.  It was a very lovely family picture; a pretty house, surrounded by attractive scenery; scholarship, refinement, simple elegance, giving distinction to a home which to us seemed a pattern of all we could wish to see beneath an English roof.  It all comes back to me very sweetly, but very tenderly and sadly, for the voice of the elder of the two sisters who sang to us is heard no more on earth, and a deep shadow has fallen over the household we found so bright and cheerful.

Everything was done to make me enjoy my visit to Oxford, but I was suffering from a severe cold, and was paying the penalty of too much occupation and excitement.  I missed a great deal in consequence, and carried away a less distinct recollection of this magnificent seat of learning than of the sister university.

If one wishes to know the magic of names, let him visit the places made memorable by the lives of the illustrious men of the past in the Old World.  As a boy I used to read the poetry of Pope, of Goldsmith, and of Johnson.  How could I look at the Bodleian Library, or wander beneath its roof, without recalling the lines from “The Vanity of Human Wishes”?

  “When first the college rolls receive his name,
  The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame;
  Resistless burns the fever of renown,
  Caught from the strong contagion of the gown: 
  O’er Bodley’s dome his future labors spread,
  And Bacon’s mansion trembles o’er his head.”

The last line refers to Roger Bacon.  “There is a tradition that the study of Friar Bacon, built on an arch over the bridge, will fall when a man greater than Bacon shall pass under it.  To prevent so shocking an accident, it was pulled down many years since.”  We shall meet with a similar legend in another university city.  Many persons have been shy of these localities, who were in no danger whatever of meeting the fate threatened by the prediction.