MEMOIR xxi 



Association football, playing in the 'Varsity match of 

 1883. The portrait which forms the frontispiece to 

 this book (an extremely good likeness) was enlarged 

 from one in a group photographed immediately before 

 the match for the Inter-collegiate cup won by Hert- 

 ford in 1885. 



His life at Oxford was a very happy one. He had 

 successfully accomplished the first task which he had 

 set himself to carry out, and this in itself was a source 

 of considerable satisfaction to him. Although most 

 of his old school friends had left Oxford before he 

 went up, he found many other congenial companions. 

 Readers of his articles in Country Life on old houses, 

 mills, bridges, and old architecture generally, will 

 readily understand how keenly he enjoyed the archi- 

 tectural beauty and historic associations of the Uni- 

 versity and its buildings, while the treasures of the 

 Bodleian and the peaceful loveliness of the river 

 scenery appealed with equal force to his keenly 

 appreciative nature. 



In the meantime his father had left Suffolk and 

 become Rector of Childrey, a village on the slope of 

 the Berkshire downs, and Charles Cornish soon came 

 to know and love the rolling down country and the 

 wide vale beneath as well as the poplar-studded 

 meadows of his Suffolk home. The Berkshire downs 

 were at that time still a great corn-growing country, 

 where the down partridges flourished ; and the shoot- 

 ing of the Childrey glebe, some six hundred acres 

 in extent, was always reserved by the Rector for his 

 sons and their friends. The fields were wide and 



