admiration of the pure collegiate-gothic style of the low hall that
extended north and south three hundred feet in either direction from
the base of the great tower; he would note the artistry of the
iron-braced, oaken doors, flanked at the lintels by inscrutable faces
of carven stone, of the windows with their diamonded panes of milky
glass peeping through a wilderness of encroaching vines. Nor would
this be all. Had he ever viewed the quadrangles of Oxford and
Cambridge, he might be able to infer that here, on this sunny plateau
above the hill, devoted men, steept in the traditions of old England,
had endeavoured to reproduce the plan of one of her famous colleges.

He would see, perhaps, that only one side of the quadrangle was built,
one fourth of the work done. Here, along the northern line, should be
the chapel, its altar window facing the east; on the southern, the
dining-hall, adorned with rafters of dark oak and with portraits of the
wise and great. To complete the plan, the remaining gap must be closed
by a hall similar in style to the one already built.

He might picture himself standing in the midst of this beautiful
creation of the imagination, taking in its architectural glories one by
one, until his eye paused at the eastern gateway to note the distant
landscape which it framed. And then, if he were in sympathy with the
ideals of which this building was the outward expression, he would wake
from his constructive reverie to realise sadly for the first time, not
the beauty, but the incompleteness, of the institution; not its
proximity to the city beyond, but its air of aloofness from the
community in which it stood.

About ten o'clock of the morning in which this story begins, a
stranger, not quite such an one as we have imagined, left the car at