"Oh, yes. I was in the crew of—74—our year it was."
"Really! really!—I had no idea, Dr. Morton Sims! I was in the Trials of—71, when Merton was head of the river, but we were the losing boat and I never got into the Eight. How different it all was then!"
Both men were silent for a minute. The priest's words had struck an unaccustomed chord of memory in the doctor's mind.
"Those times will never come again," Morton Sims said, and puffed rather more quickly than usual at his pipe. He had spoken truly enough when he had said that he had not time in his strenuous life for memories of his youth, that he shut his eyes to the immemorial appeal of Oxford when he went there. But he responded now, instinctively, for there is a Freemasonry, greater than all the ritual of King Solomon, among those who have rowed upon the Isis, in the happy, thrice-happy days of Youth!
To weary clergymen absorbed in the va and vient of sordid parishes, to grave Justices upon the Bench, the strenuous cynics of the Bar, plodding masters of schools, the suave solicitor, the banker, the painter, or the poet, these vivid memories of the Loving Mother, must always come now and again in life.
The Bells of Youth ring once more. The faint echo of the shouts from river or from playing field, make themselves heard with ghostly voices. In the Chapels of Wayneflete, or of Laud, some soprano choir is singing yet. In the tower of the Cardinal, Big Tom tolls out of the past, bidding the College porters close their doors.
White and fretted spires shoot upwards into skies that will never be so blue again. Again the snap-dragon blooms over the grey walls of Trinity, the crimson creeper stains the porch of Cranmer, and Autumn leaves of bronze, purple and yellow carpet all the Magdalen Walks.
These things can never be quite forgotten by those who have loved them and been of them.
The duration of a reverie is purely accidental. There is no time in thought. The pictures of a lifetime may glow in the brain, while a second passes by the clock, a single episode may inform the retrospection of an hour.
These two grey-headed men, upon this delightful summer morning, were not long lost in thought.