ntre of
attraction, with one eye piously closed upon the fleeting vanities of
this life--an excellent effect--and the other open a crack to observe
the tears, the sorrow, the admiration--all for me--all for me!

Ah, that was the proudest moment of my long life--until Oxford!

* * * * *

Most Americans have been to Oxford and will remember what a dream of the
Middle Ages it is, with its crooked lanes, its gray and stately piles of
ancient architecture and its meditation-breeding air of repose and
dignity and unkinship with the noise and fret and hurry and bustle of
these modern days. As a dream of the Middle Ages Oxford was not perfect
until Pageant day arrived and furnished certain details which had been
for generations lacking. These details began to appear at mid-afternoon
on the 27th. At that time singles, couples, groups and squadrons of the
three thousand five hundred costumed characters who were to take part in
the Pageant began to ooze and drip and stream through house doors, all
over the old town, and wend toward the meadows outside the walls. Soon
the lanes were thronged with costumes which Oxford had from time to time
seen and been familiar with in bygone centuries--fashions of dress which
marked off centuries as by dates, and mile-stoned them back, and back,
and back, until history faded into legend and tradition, when Arthur was
a fact and the Round Table a reality. In this rich commingling of quaint
and strange and brilliantly colored fashions in dress the dress-changes
of Oxford for twelve centuries stood livid and realized to the eye;
Oxford as a dream of the Middle Ages was complete now as it had never,
in our day, before been complete; at last there was no discord; the
mouldering old buildings, and the picturesque throngs drifting past
them, were in harmony; soon--astonishingly soon!--the only persons that
seemed out of place, and grotesquely and offensively and criminally out
of place were such persons as came intruding along clothed in the ugly
and odious fashions of the twentieth century; they were a bitterness to
the feelings, an insult to the eye.

The make-ups of illustrious historic personages seemed perfect, both as
to portraiture and costume; one had no trouble in recognizing them.
Also, I was apparently quite easily recognizable myself. The first
corner I turned brought me suddenly face to face with Henry VIII, a
person whom I had been implacably disliking for