to renew and to increase. Most people are conscious of
the fact that in looking back upon their past lives, especially upon the
days of their childhood, it is the sunshine that abides with them and
not the shadow. In all the memories, let us say, of a garden in which we
played as children, the days are hot and bright, the flowers always
blooming.

So it is with Oxford. Heaven knows the place is often enough shrouded in
cold, wet mist: for weeks together the streets are muddy beyond all
other streets: at the beginning of each term (save that one by courtesy
called "summer") the chemists' shops are (or used to be) filled with
rows of bottles of quinine, to enable the poor undergraduate to struggle
against a depressing climate. But who remembers all these things in
after years? The man of fifty hears Oxford mentioned, and there comes
back to him at once a place where old grey buildings throw shadows
across shaven lawns; where the young green of the chestnut makes a
brilliant splash of colour above the college garden wall; where cool
bright waters wind beneath ancient willows, and it is good to bask in
flannels in a punt. In fact it is the few days of real summer--the two
or three in each "summer" term--that he remembers in accordance with
memory's happy scheme, in which it is the fittest that survive.

It is in summer, then, that we draw near to feast our eyes more
intimately on Oxford's charms. Not first of all upon those which she
hides away within her outer cloak of beauty, but upon the garment which
she borrows from Dame Nature, and wears with such inimitable grace.
Meadows, gardens, rivers, trees: these are the materials of which the
robe is woven, and to each belong at least some names that have become
famous beyond the boundaries of Oxford.

Who has not heard of Port Meadow--the town's meadow, as the name infers?
Low it lies on the river bank to the north-west of the town. For
hundreds of years--since the time, indeed, of the _Domesday Book_--it
has belonged to the freemen of Oxford, and to-day may still be seen
their flocks of geese, white patterned on a ground of green, with here
and there a horse with tired feet ending his days where grass is soft
and plentiful. The Isis, the Upper River as here it is commonly called,
has a special beauty as it flows along the edge of Port Meadow, for
above it hang the Witham woods, and on its edge is the little hamlet of
Binsey, giving a touch of human interest and rural pictu