The University marshal made daily reports to the Vice-Chancellor, and informed him of any disturbance. One morning he stated that he had found two men fighting near Wadham College and separated them. Some time afterwards he came upon them in another place and did not interfere. "And pray, why not?" asked the Vice-Chancellor. "Well, sir, you see, they were very comfortably at it."
This story was repeated at the breakfast table and made a great impression upon Bessie. She told it and laughed over it throughout life. If she was seated near a table when telling it, she would push herself away with her two hands as if she wanted more room to laugh, a way she had when very much amused.
It was also about the same time that the butler, standing one day by the open door, saw a freshman pursued by the proctor coming at full speed down the street. Seeing the open door the young man darted in, and rushed up the staircase. Silence for a few moments, and then peeping over the banisters the youth said in an urgent whisper, "Is he gone, is he gone?"
Now, the humour of the situation was that whilst he was so eager to escape from the proctor, nothing but a thin partition separated him from the Vice-Chancellor in his study.
We can picture to ourselves the butler's "Do you wish to see the Vice-Chancellor, sir?" and the hasty exit!
Meanwhile the child Bessie returned to her poems, her songs, her improvisings at the piano, to lessons in the schoolroom, to that terrible frame and the leaden type and raised figures, and the sums which would not "come right"; to the brothers and sisters and the happy home life. But she too had seen something of the great world lying on the outside of Oxford, and could refer back to "my visit to the North."
An old friend of the family remembers the first sight of Bessie as a girl of about twelve years old. She was in the Magdalen Gardens with a nurse and the little brother Tom, the youngest boy, of whom she was always very fond. She was standing apart on the grass; standing peaceful, motionless, with a sweet still face, and all the sad suggestion of the large darkened glasses that encased her eyes. The little boy picked daisies and took them to her and showed her the gold in the centre. She smiled as she took them, and her slender fingers fluttered about them. And the children, the flowers, the sunlight, and those beautiful gardens in the early summer, made a picture in which this friend always loved to enshrine her memory of "Little Blossom."
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Published by B. Fellowes, Ludgate Street, 1841.