lege boats during the races, but very useful just now.
There were, at the point where the street plunges into the Common, some
wooden turnstiles, and these of course were immensely in the way and men
were flung about and there was a good deal of coarse pleasantry, and
one mild freshman, who had been caught into the crowd by accident, was
thrown on to the ground and very nearly trodden to death.

The sight of the vast and mysterious Common put every one into the best
of spirits. There was room here to do anything, and it was also dark
enough and wide enough to escape if escape were advisable. Moreover
the space of it seemed so limitless that it negatived any one's
responsibility. A sudden delightful activity swept over the world, and
it was immediately every one's business to get wood from anywhere at
all and drag it into the middle of the Common. As they moved through the
turnstiles Olva fancied that he caught sight of Craven.

On the Common's edge, with bright little lights in their windows, were
perched a number of tiny houses with strips of garden in front of them.
These little eyes watched, apprehensively no doubt, the shadowy mass
that hovered under the night sky. They did not like this kind of thing,
these little houses--they remembered five or six years ago when
their cabbages had been trampled upon, their palings torn down, even
hand-to-hand contests in the passages and one roof on fire. Where were
the police? The little eyes watched anxiously. There was no sign of the
police. . . .

Olva smiled at himself for the excitement that he was feeling. He was
standing at present with Lawrence on the edge of the Common, watching,
but he was feeling irresistibly drawn towards the dark pile of wood that
was rising slowly towards the sky.

"As though one were ten years old"--and yet there was Lawrence
murmuring, "I'd awfully like to hit somebody." And that, after all,
was what it all came to. Perhaps Olva, if there were really to be some
"scraps," would be able to work off some of his apprehension, of his
breathlessness. Oh! for one wild ten minutes when scruples were flung
to the winds, when there was at last in front of one an enemy whom one
could touch, whom one could fling, physically, brutally, down before
one!

"The worst of it is," Lawrence was saying, "there are these town
cads--they'll be in the back somewhere shoutin' ''It 'im, 'Varsity,'
or somethin' and then runnin' for their lives if they see a Robert
co