Square. The old London house has gone clean out of sight, translated,
whole and fair, into a world of memory. But Borough and the common are
still here--as war has made them. Only--may I never see them again!

It was in 1882, the year of Tel-el-Kebir, when we took Peperharrow
Rectory (the Murewell Vicarage of _Robert Elsmere_) for the summer, that
we first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a great
deal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The _Macmillan_
papers I have already spoken of. They were on many subjects--Tennyson's
"Becket," Mr. Pater's "Marius," "The Literature of Introspection," Jane
Austen, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various others. I still kept up my
Spanish to some extent, and I twice examined--in 1882 and 1888--for the
Taylorian scholarship in Spanish at Oxford, our old friend, Doctor
Kitchin, afterward Dean of Durham, writing to me with glee that I should
be "making history" as "the first woman examiner of men at either
University." My colleague on the first occasion was the old Spanish
scholar, Don Pascual de Gayangos, to whom the calendaring of the Spanish
MSS. in the British Museum had been largely intrusted; and the second
time, Mr. York Powell of Christ Church--I suppose one of the most
admirable Romance scholars of the time--was associated with me. But if I
remember right, I set the papers almost entirely, and wrote the report
on both occasions. It gave me a feeling of safety in 1888, when my
knowledge, such as it was, had grown very rusty, that Mr. York Powell
overlooked the papers, seeing that to set Scholarship questions for
postgraduate candidates is not easy for one who has never been through
any proper "mill"! But they passed his scrutiny satisfactorily, and in
1888 we appointed as Taylorian Scholar a man to whom for years I
confidently looked for _the_ history of Spain--combining both the
Spanish and Arabic sources--so admirable had his work been in the
examination. But, alack! that great book has still to be written. For