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said:
    My dear Mycroft,
    Thank you for your letter, which finds me in a state of extraordinary good health and good fortune. I trust that the same can be said of you. Although I never see
     your name in the newspapers, I am sure that you have made yourself into a success in whatever field it is that you have chosen to enter. I have nothing but fond memories of our time
     together here at Oxford, although you at least made it out into the wider world. I, as you may have heard, travel to other worlds, but only in my imagination. Some of these worlds are
     mathematical, and some fantastical, but all of them I find preferable to the dull solidity of supposedly ‘real’ life.
    I would, of course, be more than happy to tutor your brother Sherlock in the logical arts. I recall how I used to envy you for having just the one sibling, considering that I have
     ten, all of whose birthdays I have to remember. I also remember how you used to speak of Sherlock when you were here. It was usually with some mixture of pride and exasperation, most
     notably when he hid a live toad in your trunk just before you left home to travel here for the summer term, and when he redrafted an essay you had written over the holidays in a perfect
     copy of your handwriting but with conclusions that would make sense only to a lunatic. How well I recall your reading that essay aloud in one of my tutorials, and with increasing panic as
     you realized that it was diverging further and further from what you remembered having written! How we laughed! I cannot, of course, guarantee Sherlock’s acceptance into Christ
     Church, or any other of the colleges here – that will depend upon his abilities and demeanour – but with the Holmes family name behind him and a character recommendation from
     me he should be in with a good chance.
    I have taken the liberty of securing him lodgings with a local landlady of good character – a Mrs McCrery of 36 Edmonton Crescent, just around the corner from this college. He
     will be on terms of room and full board – that is, breakfast and dinner – for the sum of one shilling a week. I trust this will be acceptable. I have lodged with her myself in
     the past, and found her standards of cleanliness to be unimpeachable, her peach cobbler to be a clean winner in the pudding stakes and her steak pudding to be perfection itself.
    I look forward to young Sherlock presenting himself at my rooms in college at some time in the near future. I also look forward to you visiting him regularly so that we may renew
     our acquaintance.
    Yours, ever,
    Charles
    Mycroft’s only response as he took the letter back from Sherlock was, ‘I had forgotten about the toad.’
    ‘What happened to it?’ Sherlock asked innocently.
    ‘It became something of a college mascot,’ his brother replied, ‘that is, until an unfortunate incident with a senior master’s dog.’
    ‘It was eaten?’ Sherlock was aghast. He hadn’t intended any harm to come to the creature.
    ‘No – the dog tried to eat it, but choked. The master pulled it out of the dog’s throat and threw it into the river in a fit of rage. Misplaced rage, of course, as the toad was
perfectly happy in the water – happier, I suspect, than it had ever been at college. Certainly happier than the dog, who would never eat anything after that without carefully inspecting it
and turning it over several times first.’
    Mycroft had offered to pay for Sherlock to take the train to Oxford, but, remembering his conversation with Matty, Sherlock had declined. He had rather taken to the idea of a slow journey by
barge, experiencing the landscape as they went – two friends, together. When he explained this, Mycroft had made a ‘harrumph’ noise, and muttered, ‘How uncivilized. How
uncomfortable.’
    Sherlock spent the last day before they left London revisiting his favourite places – the bridges over the Thames, the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road, the London Zoo and the hustle