A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 149 



the College Hall ; then is it easiest to raise the dead, 

 and renew one's ancient terms. 



My walks about the town generally lead me by a 

 certain Tractarian-Gothic doorway in a cobble-paved 

 side-street, a door that I seldom pass without an 

 almost physical pang. Moralists have, I think, un- 

 accountably neglected to take into consideration 

 that flightiness of the human conscience which so 

 often produces an odd want of sense of proportion. 

 I doubt if any crime against my kind or my country 

 could leave a worse sting of remorse in me than did 

 the fact that I once went through that door to dine 

 with the Head, a forlorn, uncouth Freshman in a 

 black morning-coat and blue-spotted tie. As with 

 the superstitions learnt in childhood, the horror of 

 the thing will not quite rub out of the grain : I 

 still see the puzzled shirt-fronts, the unwincing polite- 

 ness of the hostess whom the College called Polly. 

 I remember a man on my staircase who once asked 

 me up to his rooms to see the empty bottles in his 

 scout's-hole the vast relics of a wine to which I 

 had not been invited. It was a deed of a curious 

 badness ; but had it been mine, the memory would 

 have passed long before that accusing tail-coat began 

 to lose its power. The Puginesque door with its 

 broken-nosed corbels will never be to me as the 



