the Vicar, the Senior Tutor and I.

I think the twilit hour exactly accorded with our mood, and it did
not need the scent of the Vicar's ten-week stocks, wafted across the
garden, to touch a nerve of memory. For it was twenty years since we
had last sat in this place and talked, and the summer night seemed to
be laden with tranquil thoughts, with friendship and old regard.
. . . Twenty years ago I had been an undergraduate, and had made one
of a reading-party under the Senior Tutor, who annually in the Long
Vacation brought down two or three fourth-year men to bathe and boat
and read Plato with him, for no pay but their friendship: and,
generation after generation, we young men had been made welcome in
this garden by the Vicar, who happened to be an old member of our
College and (as in time I came to see) delighted to renew his youth
in ours. There had been daughters, too, in the old days. . . .
But they had married, and the Vicarage nest was empty long since.

The Senior Tutor, too, had given up work and retired upon his
Fellowship. But every summer found him back at his old haunts; and
still every summer brought a reading-party to the Cove, in conduct
now of a brisk Junior Fellow, who had read with me in our time and
achieved a "first." In short, things at the Cove were pretty much
the same after twenty years, barring that a small colony of painters
had descended upon it and made it their home. With them the
undergraduates had naturally and quickly made friends, and the result
was a cricket match--a grand Two-days' Cricket Match. They were all
extremely serious about it, and the Oxford party--at their wits' end,
no doubt, to make up a team against the Artists--had bethought
themselves of me, who dwelt at the other end of the Duchy. They had
written--they had even sent a two-page telegram--to me, who had not