Aunt Celia went up behind him, and, Van Tyck though she is, she could not restrain her admiration of his work. I was surprised myself: I didn’t suppose so good looking a youth could do such good work. I retired to a safe distance, and they chatted together. He offered her the sketch; she refused to take advantage of his kindness. He said he would “dash off” another that evening, and bring it to our hotel,—“so glad to do anything for a fellow-countryman,” etc. I peeped from behind a tree and saw him give her his card. It was an awful moment; I trembled, but she read it with unmistakable approval, and gave him her own with an expression that meant, “Yours is good, but beat that if you can!”

She called to me, and I appeared. Mr. John Quincy Copley, Cambridge, was presented to her niece, Miss Katharine Schuyler, New York. It was over, and a very small thing to take so long about, too.

He is an architect, and of course has a smooth path into aunt Celia’s affections. Theological students, ministers, missionaries, heroes, and martyrs she may distrust, but architects never!

“He is an architect, my dear Katharine, and he is a Copley,” she told me afterwards. “I never knew a Copley who was not respectable, and many of them have been more.”

After the introduction was over, aunt Celia asked him guilelessly if he had visited any other of the English cathedrals. Any others, indeed! This to a youth who had been all but in her lap for a fortnight! It was a blow, but he rallied bravely, and, with an amused look in my direction, replied discreetly that he had visited most of them at one time or another. I refused to let him see that I had ever noticed him before; that is, particularly.

Memoranda: “The very stones and mortar of this historic town seem impregnated with the spirit of restful antiquity.” (Extract from one of aunt Celia’s letters.) Among the great men who have studied here are the Prince of Wales, Duke of Wellington, Gladstone, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Philip Sidney, William Penn, John Locke, the two Wesleys, Ruskin, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Otway. (Look Otway up.)

HE

Oxford, June 13 The Angel.

Oxford

I have done it, and if I hadn’t been a fool and a coward I might have done it a week ago, and spared myself a good deal of delicious torment. I have just given two hours to a sketch of Addison’s Walk and carried it to aunt Celia at the Mitre. Object, to find out whether they make a 

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