a good deal; and he loved to read
books, which is not to say that he loved study; he hated getting out of
bed, and he was constantly gated for morning chapel. More than once he had
sweetly gone to sleep over his examination papers. This is not to say that
he failed at his examinations--on the contrary, he always succeeded; but
he only did enough to pass and no more; and he did not wish to do more
than pass. His going to sleep at examinations was evidence that he was
either indifferent or self-indulgent, and it certainly showed that he was
without nervousness. He invariably roused himself, or his professor roused
him, a half-hour before the papers should be handed in, and, as it were,
by a mathematical calculation he had always done just enough to prevent
him being plucked.

He slept at lectures, he slept in hall, he slept as he waited his turn to
go to the wicket in a cricket match, and he invariably went to sleep
afterward. He even did so on the day he had made the biggest score in the
biggest game ever played between his college and the pick of the country;
but he first gorged himself with cake and tea. The day he took his degree
he had to be dragged from a huge grandfather's chair and forced along in
his ragged gown--"ten holes and twelve tatters"--to the function in the
convocation-hall. He looked so fat and shiny, so balmy and sleepy, when he
took his degree and was handed his prize for a poem on Sir John Franklin,
that the public laughed, and the college men in the gallery began
singing--

"Bye O, my baby,
Father will come to you soo-oon!"

He seemed not to care, but yawned in his hand as he put his prize book
under his arm through one of the holes in his gown, and in two minutes was
back in his room, and in another five was fast asleep.

It was the general opinion that William Rufus Holly, fat, yellow-haired,
and twenty-four years old, was doomed to failure in life, in spite of the
fact that he had a little income of a thousand dollars a year and had made
a century in an important game of cricket. Great, therefore, was the
surprise of the college, and afterward of the Province, when, at the
farewell dinner of the graduates, Sleeping Beauty announced, between his
little open-eyed naps, that he was going Far North as a missionary.

At first it was thought he was joking, but when at last, in his calm and
dreamy look, they saw he meant what he said, they arose and carried him