ey
must all go away laden with the good things of the Christ Church larder
and cellar, at which he protested. Some undergraduates emerged in cap
and gown from a lecture room and began to show fight. We drove them into
Peckwater at the point of the bayonet.

Then the Steward and the Junior Censor appeared, and the latter began to
reason with us in what I considered a tone unbecoming to a private
person resident in an invaded country. I raised a heavy knout which I
carried, and was going to flog the Junior Censor where he stood, when
the Steward intervened, and, giving hurried orders to all the scouts and
porters that stood around watching the scene, soon produced the finest
store of provisions that we had met with in all our campaigning. The
mules were marched out of Tom Gate, up St. Aldate's, along the Corn and
out to Port Meadow, where we were encamped, laden with sirloins of beef,
with turkeys, with geese and ducks and fowls and pheasants, with beer in
the barrel and port wine in the case, while I remember taking special
personal possession of a mould of 'aspic of larks' which I fancied for
my supper.

But then I woke, and by doing so felt done out of that aspic of larks,
which would have been a pleasant change from the fare of those days.

Quite a silly dream of course; but on recalling it with my waking
thoughts, and feeling sympathy for the Dean and students of Christ
Church, I felt some too for those poor lamas whom we had invaded the day
before.

CHAPTER XX

REACHING LHASSA: SUPPLIES: MESSING: THE LHASSA BAZAAR

The mode of our arrival in the environs of Lhassa was something of an
anti-climax. We had marched four hundred miles, fought a few fights, and
provided ourselves throughout our journey with the necessaries of life,
much against the will of the enemy, and here we were at Lhassa, where an
exciting climax to our march, such as a good fight in the Lhassa plain,
would have been highly artistic. Here stood the Debun monastery, and
there further on the Sara monastery, full of monks who at that time
hated us. A few good shells in those monasteries would have set the
monks buzzing in consternation like swarming bees disturbed. There
glistened in the sun the gilded roof of the chief astrologer's house,
that would have made grand loot and have looked so well in the British
Museum. There ahead of us rose majestically on its conical hill the
Pota-La, that _piece de resistance_ which would have really ta