Walrond accepted it, and it has had much success at Oxford, I am
told, as was perhaps likely from its _couleur locale_. I am hardly
ever at Oxford now, but the sentiment of the place is overpowering
to me when I have leisure to feel it, and can shake off the
interruptions which it is not so easy to shake off now as it was
when we were young. But on Tuesday afternoon I smuggled myself away,
and got up into one of our old coombs among the Cumner hills, and
into a field waving deep with cowslips and grasses, and gathered
such a bunch as you and I used to gather in the cowslip field on
Lutterworth road long years ago.

You dear old boy, I love your congratulations although I see and
hear so little of you, and, alas! _can_ see and hear but so little
of you. I was supported by people of all opinions, the great bond
of union being, I believe, the affectionate interest felt in papa's
memory. I think it probable that I shall lecture in English: there
is no direction whatever in the Statute as to the language in which
the lectures shall be: and the Latin has so died out, even among
scholars, that it seems idle to entomb a lecture which, in English,
might be stimulating and interesting.

On the same occasion, writing to his mother, the new Professor gives an
amusing account of the election day, when my uncle and aunt came up to
town from Hampton, where they were living, in order to get telegraphic
news of the polling from friends at Oxford. "Christ Church"--i.e., the
High Church party in Oxford--had put up an opposition candidate, and the
excitement was great. My uncle was by this time the father of three
small boys, Tom, Trevenen--_alias_ Budge--and Richard--"Diddy."

We went first to the telegraph station at Charing Cross. Then, about