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remember that the deliciously cool sheets and coarse blankets were topped by a purple puff smelling faintly of lavender, and that in the morning, dressing, my wife and I skipped in and out of the radiant influence of the electric heater like a nymph and satyr competing at a shrine. The heater’s plug was a ponderous and dangerous-looking affair of three prongs; plugging it in was my first real work of acclimatization. We appeared for breakfast a bit late. Of all the other boarders, only Mr. Robinson (I have forgotten his actual name) had yet to come down. Our places were laid at the dining table, and at my place—I couldn’t believe my eyes—was set an insanity, a half of a cooked tomato on a slice of fried bread.
    Mr. Robinson came down as Mr. Pott was finishing explaining to us why we must quickly find permanent lodgings. Our room would soon be needed by its regular tenant, an Indian undergraduate. Any day now he would take it into his head toshow up. It was a thankless job, keeping students’ rooms; they were in and out and up and talking and making music at all hours, and the landlord was supposed to enforce the midnight curfew. “The short of it is,” Mr. Pott snarled, “the university wants me to be a nanny and a copper’s nark.” His voice changed tone. “Ah, Mr. Robinson! Good morning, Professor. We have with us two lovebirds from across the Atlantic.”
    Mr. Robinson ceremoniously shook our hands. Was he a professor? He was of middle size, with a scholar’s delicate hunch and long thinning yellowish-white hair brushed straight back. In speech, he was all courtesy, lucid patter, and flattering attention. We turned to him with relief; after our host’s dark hints and dour discontents, we seemed to be emerging into the England of light. “Welcome to Oxford,” he said, and from a bright little tension in his cheeks we could see he was about to quote. “ ‘That home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties.’ That’s Matthew Arnold; if you want to understand Oxford, read Arnold. Student of Balliol, fellow of Oriel, professor of poetry, the highest bird as ever flew with a pedant’s clipped wings. Read Arnold, and read Newman. ‘Whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age’—which he did not
mean
, you know, entirely sympathetically; no, not at all. Arnold was not at all church-minded. ‘The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full … But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long,
withdrawing
roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.’ Hah! Mr. Pott, what is this I see before me? My customary egg. You are a veritable factotum, a Johannes Factotum, of kindness. Mr. Pott of St. John’s Street,” he confided to us in his quick, twinkling way, “an institution no less revered by the student body than the church of St.Michael’s-at-the-North-Gate, which contains, you should know, and will
see
, the oldest standing structure in”—he cleared his throat, as if to signal something special coming—“Oxnaford: the old Saxon tower, dating from the ninth century at the least. At the
least
, I insist, though in doing so I incur the certain wrath of the more piddling of local archaeologists, if we can dignify them with the title upon which Schliemann and Sir Leonard Woolley have heaped so much indelible honor.” He set to his egg eagerly, smashing it open with a spoon.
    My wife asked him, “Are you a professor of archaeology?”
    “Dear madam,” he said, “in a manner of speaking, in a manner of speaking, I have taken all knowledge for my province. Do you know Ann Arbor, in, I believe, the very wooded state of Michigan? No? Have no shame, no shame; your country is so vast, a poor Englishman’s head reels. My niece, my sister’s daughter, married an instructor in the university there. I learn from her letters that the temperature