e Wardens and the Bursars of colleges could tell us much, but the
stranger and the pilgrim, coming to worship, feel as if there must have
flashed into being some sudden Hand from Nowhere and a commanding Voice
saying--"Thus far shalt thou come and no farther," so that the accursed
jerry-builder (under the impression that he was moved by some financial
reasons of his own) must have obediently picked up his little bag of
tools and trotted off to destroy some other place.

Anyhow the real Oxford has been spared--but it is like a fair mystic gem
in a coarse setting. No green fields and no rustling woods lead the
lover of Oxford gently to her walls.

The Beauty of England lies there--ringed about with a desolation of
ugliness--for ever. Still she is there.

Oxford has never been merely a city of learning, it has been a fighting
city.

In the twelfth century it sheltered Matilda in that terrible, barbaric
struggle of young England.

In the seventeenth century it was a city in arms for the Stuarts. But
these were civil wars. Now in the twentieth century Oxford has risen
like one man, like Galahad--youthful and knightly--urgent at the Call of
Freedom and the Rights of Nations.

And this Oxford is filled with the "sound of the forging of weapons,"
the desk has become a couch for the wounded, the air is full of the
wings of war.

* * * * *

In this Oxford where the black gown has been laid aside and young men
hurry to and fro in the dress of the battle-field--in this Oxford no man
walked at times more heavily, feeling the grief that cannot be made
articulate, than did the Warden of King's College as he went about his
work, a lonely man, without wife or child and with poignant memories of
the very blossom of young manhood plucked from his hand and gone for
ever.

And of the men who passed under his college gates and through the
ivy-clad quadrangles, most were strangers--coming and going--learning
the arts of war--busy under orders, and the few, a poor remnant of
academic youth--foreigners or weaklings. And he, the Warden himself,
felt himself almost a stranger--for into his life had surged new
thoughts, anxious fears and ambitious hopes--for England, the England of
the years to come--an England rising up from her desolation and her
mourning and striving to become greater, more splendid and more
spiritual than she had been before.

It was a late October afternoon in 1916 and the last rays