welcome in view of his college
expenses. There the matter rested, and Mrs. Elsmere, during the two
years which followed, thought little more about it. She became more
and more absorbed in her boy's immediate prospects, in the care of his
health, which was uneven and tried somewhat by the strain of preparation
for an attempt on the St. Anselm's scholarship, and in the demands which
his ardent nature, oppressed with the weight of its own aspirations, was
constantly making upon her support and sympathy.

At last the moment so long expected arrived. Mrs. Elsmere and her son
left Harden amid a chorus of good wishes, and settled themselves early
in November in Oxford lodgings. Robert was to have a few days' complete
holiday before the examination, and he and his mother spent it in
exploring the beautiful old town, now shrouded in the 'pensive glooms'
of still gray autumn weather. There was no sun to light up the misty
reaches of the river; the trees in the Broad Walk were almost bare; the
Virginian creeper no longer shone in patches of delicate crimson on the
college walls; the gardens were damp and forsaken. But to Mrs. Elsmere
and Robert the place needed neither sun nor summer 'for beauty's
heightening.' On both of them it laid its old irresistible spell; the
sentiment haunting its quadrangles, its libraries, and its dim melodious
chapels, stole into the lad's heart and alternately soothed and
stimulated that keen individual consciousness which naturally
accompanies the first entrance into manhood. Here, on this soil,
steepest in memories, _his_ problems, _his_ struggles, were to be fought
out in their turn, 'Take up thy manhood,' said the inward voice, 'and
show what is in thee. The hour and the opportunity have come!'

And to this thrill of vague expectation, this young sense of an
expanding world, something of pathos and of sacredness was added by
the dumb influences of the old streets and weather-beaten stones. How
tenacious they were of the past! The dreaming city seemed to be still
brooding in the autumn calm over the long succession of her sons. The
continuity, the complexity of human experience; the unremitting effort
of the race; the stream of purpose running through it all; these were
the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and fragmentary
shape, pervaded the boy's sensitive mind as he rambled with his mother
from college to college.

Mrs. Elsmere, too, was fascinated by Oxford. But for all her eag