s
it signify? She certainly is the loveliest girl I ever saw, though!
heigho!" and, with a sigh, for which I should have been somewhat
puzzled rationally to account, I took up my gun, and set off for a day's
shooting with Harry Oaklands. ~160~~

CHAPTER XX -- ALMA MATER

"He's a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can
easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of
the twenty to follow my own teaching. The brain may devise
laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps over a cold decree."
--_Merchant of Venice_.

TIME, that venerable and much-vituperated individual, who, if he has to
answer for some acts savouring of a taste for wanton destruction--if
he now and then lunches on some noble old abbey, which had remained a
memorial of the deep piety and marvellous skill of our forefathers--if
he crops, by way of salad, some wide-spreading beech or hoary
patriarchal oak, which had flung its shade over the tombs of countless
generations, and, as it stood forming a link between the present and the
past, won men's reverence by force of contrast with their own ephemeral
existence--yet atones for his delinquencies by softening the bitterness
of grief, blunting the sharp edge of pain, and affording to the
broken-hearted the rest, and to the slave the freedom, of the
grave;--old Time, I say, who should be praised at all events for his
perseverance and steadiness, swept onward with his scythe, and cutting
his way through the frost and snow of winter, once more beheld the dust
of that "brother of the east wind," March, converted into mud by the
showers of April, and the summer was again approaching. It was on a fine
morning in May, that, as Oaklands and I were breakfasting together in my
rooms at Trinity, we heard a tap at the door, and the redoubtable Shrimp
made his appearance. This interesting youth had, under Lawless's able
tuition, arrived at such a pitch of knowingness that it was utterly
impossible to make him credit anything; he had not the smallest particle
of confidence remaining in the integrity of man, woman, or child; and,
like many another of the would-be wise in their generation, the only
flaw in his scepticism was the bigoted nature of his faith in the false
and hateful doctrine of the universal depravity of the human race.
He was the bearer of a missive from his master, inviting Oaklands and
myself to a wine-party at his rooms that evening.

"I suppose we m