“I knew I’d packed them,” Terence said, coming up with a green wool blanket. “Here,” he said, handing it to the professor. “Take that off and put this round you.”

Professor Peddick unbuttoned his robe. “His brother, Tuttle Major, was the same way. Dreadful penmanship.” He pulled his arm out of one sleeve and stopped, a peculiar expression on his face, and stuck his arm into the other sleeve.

“Always blotted his essays.” His hand groped wildly in the sleeve. “Translated ‘Non omnia possumus omnus’ as ‘No possums allowed on the omnibus.’ “He made one last wild gyration and pulled his arm out of the sleeve, “Thought he’d never be able to sit exams,” and opened his closed hand to reveal a tiny white fish.

“Ah, Ugobio fluviatilis albinus,” he said, peering at its flopping. “Where’s my hat?”

Terence produced the professor’s mortarboard, and Professor Peddick dipped it in the river and then dropped the fish into the water-filled hat. “Excellent specimen,” he said, leaning over it. “Assistant to the Head of the Exchequer now. Advisor to the Queen.”

I sat there watching him examine the fish and marvelling at what we’d caught. A genuine eccentric Oxford don. They’re an extinct species, too, unless you count Mr. Dunworthy, who is really too sensible to be eccentric, and I had always felt a bit cheated that I hadn’t been there in the glory days of Jowett and R. W. Roper. Spooner was the most famous, of course, because of his gift for mangling the Queen’s English. He’d told a delinquent student, “You have tasted a worm,” and announced the morning hymn one Sunday as “Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take.”

My favorite don was Claude Jenkins, whose house was so messy it was sometimes impossible to open the front door, and who had arrived late for a meeting and apologized by saying, “My housekeeper has just died, but I’ve propped her up on a kitchen chair, and she’ll be all right till I return.”

But they had all been personalities: Professor of Logic Cook Wilson, who after two hours of steady orating, said, “After these preliminary remarks…” Mathematics professor Charles Dodgson who, when Queen Victoria wrote him praising Alice in Wonderland and requesting a copy of his next book, sent her his mathematical treatise Condensations of Determinants, and the professor of classics who thought a barometer would look better if placed horizontally rather than vertically.

And of course Buckland, with his household menagerie and his trained eagle who had strutted, wings half spread, down the aisle of Christ Church Cathedral during morning prayers. (Church must have been exciting in those days. Perhaps Bishop Bittner should have tried introducing animals to Coventry Cathedral when attendance lagged. Or Spoonerisms.)

But I had never expected to actually meet one in the flesh, and here he was, an excellent specimen, interestedly peering at a fish swimming in his mortarboard, and orating on the subject of history.

“Overforce propounds the theory that the study of history as a chronicle of kings and battles and events is obsolete,” Professor Peddick said. “ ‘Darwin has revolutionized biology,’ he says—”

Darwin. The same Darwin whom Professor Overforce had taught to climb trees?

“ ‘—and so must history be revolutionized,’ Overforce claims. ‘It must no longer be a chronicle of dates and incidents and facts. They are no more important than a finch or a fossil is to the theory of evolution.’ ”

Actually, I thought, they were utterly important.

“ ‘Only the laws underlying the theory of history are important, and they are natural laws.’ ‘But what of the events that have shaped history for good or ill?’ I asked him. ‘Events are irrelevant,’ Overforce said. Julius Caesar’s assassination! Leonidas’s stand at Thermopylae! Irrelevant!”

“So you were fishing on the riverbank,” Terence said, spreading the professor’s robe out to dry over the luggage. “And Professor Overforce came along and pitched you in?”

“Yes,” Professor Peddick said, pulling off his boots. “I was standing under a willow, hooking a worm to my line-gudgeons prefer blood-worms but Pseudococcidae will do — when that imbecile Darwin flung himself out of the branches and plummeted toward me like one of Satan’s angels ‘hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion down,’ and landed with a great splash that made me drop my line.’ He looked darkly at Cyril. “Dogs!”

A dog, I thought gratefully. Darwin is Professor Overforce’s dog. Which still didn’t explain what it was doing jumping out of trees.

“He’ll end by killing someone.” Professor Peddick took off his socks, wrung them out, and put them back on again. “Leaped out of a tree on the Broad last Tuesday and knocked Trinity’s bursar flat. The man’s completely unbalanced. He fancies himself another Buckland,” professor Peddick said, “but Buckland, for all his faults, never trained his bear to jump out of trees. Tiglath Pileser was always extremely well-behaved, and so were the jackals, though one wouldn’t want to dine at his house. Liable to be served crocodile. I remember one dinner party at which the meat course was vole. But he had two excellent Crucian carp.”

“Darwin made you drop your line…” Terence prompted, trying to get the professor back on track.

“Yes, and when I turned round, there was Overforce, laughing like one of Buckland’s hyenas. ‘Out fishing?’ he said. ‘Tch, tch. You will never attain the Haviland Chair idling your time away like that.’ ‘I am pondering the effects of Themistocles’s deception of the Persians at Salamis,’ I said, and he replied, ‘An even more idle pursuit than fishing. History is no longer a chronicle of mere events. It is a science.’

“ ‘Mere events!’ I said. ‘Do you consider the Greeks’ defeat of the Persian fleet a mere event? It shaped the course of history for hundreds of years!’ Overforce waved his hand as if to dismiss them. ‘Events are irrelevant to the theory of history.’ ‘Do you consider the Battle of Agincourt irrelevant?’ I said. ‘Or the Crimean War? Or the execution of Mary Queen of Scots?’ ‘Details!’ he said. ‘Did details matter to Darwin or Newton?’ ”

As a matter of fact, they had. As Lady Schrapnell is so fond of saying, “God is in the details.”

“ ‘Darwin! Newton!’ I said,” Professor Peddick went on. “ ‘You disprove your own argument by your examples. It is the individual that matters in history, not the population. And it is forces other than natural ones that shape history. What of courage and honor and faith? What of villainy and cowardice and ambition?’ ”

“And love,” Terence said.

“Exactly,” Professor Peddick said. “ ‘What of Antony and Cleopatra’s love? Was that irrelevant to history?’ I asked him that while he was in the water. ‘What of Richard the Third’s villainy?’ I said. ‘What of Joan of Arc’s fervor? It is character, not populations, that affect history!’ ”

“In the water?” I said blankly.

Terence echoed, “You pushed Professor Overforce in the water?”

“A push is an event, an incident, a fact,” Professor Peddick said, “and therefore irrelevant to Overforce’s theory. I said that to him when he shouted at me to pull him out. ‘Natural forces acting upon populations,’ I said.”

“Good Lord,” Terence said. “Turn the boat around, Ned. We’ve got to go back. I do hope he isn’t drowned by now.”

“Drowned? Impossible! A drowning is unimportant in his theory of history, though it be the drowning of the Duke of Clarence in a vat of malmsey! ‘What of murders?’ I said to him while he was splashing about, waving his arms and calling for help. ‘And what of help? They are irrelevant, for both require intention and morality, of both of which you have denied the existence. Where in your theory are purpose and plan and design?’ ‘I knew it!’ Overforce said, thrashing wildly. ‘Your theory of history is nothing but an argument for a Grand Design!’ ‘And is there not evidence for a Grand Design?’ I said, offering my hand to him to pull him out. ‘Is there only chance in your theory of history? Is there no free will? Are there no acts of kindness?’ I said, and pulled Overforce up onto the bank. ‘Surely you must admit now that the individual and the event are not irrelevant to history,’ I said, quite reasonably. And the villain pushed me in!”