use it to-day. On the day when I saw this kitchen, four cooks were
busy roasting an ox whole for the students' lunch: this at least is
what I presumed they were doing from the size of the fire-place used,
but it may not have been an ox; perhaps it was a cow. On a huge
table, twelve feet by six and made of slabs of wood five inches
thick, two other cooks were rolling out a game pie. I estimated it as
measuring three feet across. In this rude way, unchanged since the
time of Henry VIII, the unhappy Oxford students are fed. I could not
help contrasting it with the cosy little boarding houses on Cottage
Grove Avenue where I used to eat when I was a student at Chicago, or
the charming little basement dining-rooms of the students' boarding
houses in Toronto. But then, of course, Henry VIII never lived in
Toronto.

The same lack of a building-fund necessitates the Oxford students,
living in the identical old boarding houses they had in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called "quadrangles,"
"closes" and "rooms"; but I am so broken in to the usage of my
student days that I can't help calling them boarding houses. In many
of these the old stairway has been worn down by the feet of ten
generations of students: the windows have little latticed panes:
there are old names carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick
growth of ivy covers the walls. The boarding house at St. John's
College dates from 1509, the one at Christ Church from the same
period. A few hundred thousand pounds would suffice to replace these
old buildings with neat steel and brick structures like the normal
school at Schenectady, N.Y., or the Peel Street High School at
Montreal. But nothing is done. A movement was indeed attempted last
autumn towards removing the ivy from the walls, but the result was
unsatisfactory and they are putting it back. Any one could have told