e people trespassing from a high road.

On their first evening the two candidates were invited to dine with the
Principal, who read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner, only
pausing from their perusal to ask occasionally in a courtly tone if Mr.
Lidderdale or Mr. Emmett would not take another glass of wine. After
dinner they sat in his library where the Principal addressed himself to
the evidently uncongenial task of estimating the comparative fitness of
his two guests to receive Mr. Tweedle's bounty. The Reverend Thomas
Tweedle was a benevolent parson of the eighteenth century who by his
will had provided the money to educate the son of one indigent clergyman
for four years. Mark was shy enough under the Principal's courtly
inquisition, but poor Emmett had a paroxysm each time he was asked the
simplest question about his tastes or his ambitions. His tongue
appearing like a disturbed mollusc waved its tip slowly round in an
agonized endeavour to give utterance to such familiar words as "yes" or
"no." Several times Mark feared that he would never get it back at all
and that Emmett would either have to spend the rest of his life with it
protruding before him or submit it to amputation and become a mute. When
the ordeal with the Principal was over and the two guests were strolling
back across the quadrangle to their rooms, Emmett talked normally and
without a single paroxysm about the effect his stammer must have had
upon the Principal. Mark did his best to reassure poor Emmett.

"Really," he said, "it was scarcely noticeable to anybody else. You
noticed it, because you felt your tongue getting wedged like that
between your teeth; but other people would hardly have noticed it at
all. When the Principal asked you if you were going to take Holy Orders
yourself, I'm sure he only thought you hadn't quite made up your mind
yet."

"But I'm sure he did notice something," poor Emmett bewailed. "Because
he began to hum."

"Well, but he was always humming," said Mark. "He hummed all through
dinner while he was reading those book catalogues."

"It's very kind of you, Lidderdale," said Emmett, "to make the best of
it for me, but I'm not such a fool as I look, and the Principal
certainly hummed six times as loud whenever he asked me a question as
he did over those catalogues. I know what I look like when I get into
one of those states. I once caught sight of myself in a glass by
accident, and now whenever my tongue gets