Blenkiron was good enough to explain at some length how the door worked, while Taffy, who did not need his instruction in the least, blushed to the roots of his hair.
For, indeed, it was like first love, this adoration of Oxford; shamefast, shy of its own raptures; so shy, indeed, that when he put on his hat and walked out into the streets he could not pluck up courage to ask his way.

Some of the colleges he recognised from his father's description; of one or two he discovered the names by peeping through their gateways and reading the notices pinned up by the porters' lodges, for it never occurred to him that he was free to step inside and ramble through the quadrangles.

He wondered where the river lay, and where Magdalen, and where Christ Church.
He passed along the Turl and down Brasenose Lane; and at the foot of it, beyond the great chestnut-tree leaning over Exeter wall, the vision of noble square, the dome of the Radcliffe, and St.Mary's spire caught his breath and held him gasping.

His feet took him by the gate of Brasenose and across the High.

On the farther pavement he halted, round-eyed, held at gaze by the beauty of the Virgin's porch, with the creeper drooping like a veil over its twisted pillars.
High up, white pigeons wheeled round the spire or fluttered from niche to niche, and a queer fancy took him that they were the souls of the carved saints up there, talking to one another above the city's traffic.