afterwards, being
much struck from the moment he crossed the Border with the richness of
the country he was entering, and the great superiority of its
agriculture over that of his own country. Scotch agriculture was not
born in 1740, even in the Lothians; the face of the country everywhere
was very bare and waste, and, as he was rather pointedly reminded on
the day of his arrival at Oxford, even its cattle were still lean and
poor, compared with the fat oxen of England. Among the stories told of
his absence of mind is one he is said by a writer in the _Monthly
Review_ to have been fond of relating himself whenever a particular
joint appeared on his own table. The first day he dined in the hall at
Balliol he fell into a reverie at table and for a time forgot his
meal, whereupon the servitor roused him to attention, telling him he
had better fall to, because he had never seen such a piece of beef in
Scotland as the joint then before him. His nationality, as will
presently appear, occasioned him worse trouble at Oxford than this
good-natured gibe.

He matriculated at the University on the 7th of July. Professor
Thorold Rogers, who has collected the few particulars that can now be
learned of Smith's residence at Oxford from official records, gives us
the matriculation entry: "Adamus Smith e Coll. Ball., Gen. Fil. Jul.
7mo 1740,"[10] and mentions that it is written in a round school-boy
hand--a style of hand, we may add, which Smith retained to the last.
He has himself said that literary composition never grew easier to him
with experience; neither apparently did handwriting. His letters are
all written in the same big round characters, connected together
manifestly by a slow, difficult, deliberate process.

He remained at Oxford till the 15th of August 1746; after that day his
name appears no longer in the Buttery Books of the College; but up
till that day he resided at Oxford continuously from the time of his
matriculation. He did not leave between terms, and was thus six years
on end away from home. A journey to Scotland was in those days a
serious and expensive undertaking; it would have taken more than half
Smith's exhibition of L40 to pay for the posting alone of a trip to
Kirkcaldy and back. When Professor Rouet of Glasgow was sent up to
London a few years later to push on the tedious twenty years' lawsuit
between Glasgow College and Balliol about the Snell exhibitions, the
single journey cost him L11:15s., exclusiv