nings of snow to that tinkling alarum!--and glide
in the cold and darkness under the shadow of the college-walls,
shuddering under the sharp gusts that come sweeping between the
buildings,--and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in
a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary
chapel! You follow half unconsciously some tutor's rhetorical reading of
a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish,
your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he
steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the
cover of the big book, and his head leaning slightly to one side, runs
through in gentle and tremulous tones his wonted form of invocation.

Your Division room is steaming with foul heat, and there is a strong
smell of burnt feathers and oil. A jaunty tutor with pug nose and
consequential air steps into the room--while you all rise to show him
deference--and takes his place at the pulpit-like desk. Then come the
formal loosing of his camlet cloak-clasp,--the opening of his sweaty
Xenophon to where the day's _parasangs_ begin,--the unsliding of his
silver pencil-case,--the keen, sour look around the benches, and the
cool pinch of his thumb and forefinger into the fearful box of names!

How you listen for each as it is uttered,--running down the page in
advance,--rejoicing when some hard passage comes to a stout man in the
corner; and what a sigh of relief--on mornings after you have been out
late at night--when the last paragraph is reached, the ballot drawn,
and--you, safe!

You speculate dreamily upon the faces around you. You wonder what sort
of schooling they may have had, and what sort of homes. You think one
man has got an extraordinary name, and another a still more
extraordinary nose. The glib, easy way of one student, and his perfect
_sang-froid_, completely charm you: you set him down in your own mind
as a kind of Crichton. Another weazen-faced, pinched-up fellow in a
scant cloak, you think must have been sometime a schoolmaster: he is so
very precise, and wears such an indescribable look of the ferule. There
is one big student, with a huge beard and a rollicking good-natured eye,
whom you would quite like to see measure strength with your old usher,
and on careful comparison rather think the usher would get the worst of
it. Another appears as venerable as some fathers you have seen; and it
seems wonderfully odd