THE LAST NIGHT AT MAGDALEN. 
HE best friends must part, and every pleasure must 
have an end. These are the thoughts which strike 
home as we loiter in the well-kept quadrangle of the 
most lovely College in the world. 
The still air is laden with the perfume of roses, the moths 
flit in and out of the flower-borders, the tall elms of the smallest 
deer park in England stand out against the afterglow as we listen 
to the fitful good-nights of the rooks. 
It is our own good-night as undergraduates, and we are 
silent, as we drink in deeply the beauty of our well-loved tower 
and the fading outlines of Addison’s Walk. Never again shall 
we run round past the red mays, in training for the boats or 
the cricket field ; never again shall we gather the white fritillaries 
in the meadow, or take the dear old Bishop of Chichester, when 
staying with our popular President, to rejoice over the young 
kingfishers who have just left their annual nesting-place. 
When the floods come down, the naturalists will not be 
there to see the stoats and weasels swimming to their refuge 
from the flooded meadows. Doubtless the reed-warblers will 
still build in the Don’s Walk and the jackdaws pester the deer 
for contributions of hair to line their nests ; but we shall not 
be there to see. 
Ah, the good old days ! Who could forget them if they would ? 
Who would forget them if the}' could ? B.A.’s, the successes 
of the field, the river, and the schools, these things are not in 
our thoughts to-night, but the men we have known and the 
place we have loved. Ah well, it is something to have lived 
and been at Magdalen ! How proud we are still to give — if not 
our name — our College ! It has given us the friends we only 
make once in a lifetime. It has made men of us and given us a 
never dying love for God’s Nature in every form. And so we 
three chums with our arms linked in the good old way — the 
prosperous business man, the Indian Judge, and the country 
rector that are to be — pass on to join our comrades. A last 
reunion in the rooms above the rippling Cherwell, cross-linked 
hands for auld lang syne, and we doff our caps as Oxford 
undergraduates. 
W. A. S. 
