Sunday the undergraduate may
hope (often in vain) to be asked to breakfast by some man in lodgings.
Otherwise he will be condemned to feed either upon cold
chicken--tasteless and a little dry--or upon gherkin pie, known only (by
the mercy of Providence) to certain colleges in Oxford, and consisting
of a dish of cold fat, interspersed with gherkins, and covered with lid
of heavy pastry.

Afterwards, on week days, there are lectures, then a quick change to
flannels and a hurried luncheon, and then in summertime the river or the
cricket fields. Back again he comes to cold supper and long draughts of
shandygaff in hall; then a pipe or two and a chat, and then (sometimes)
a spell of reading before bed and sleep. But all this is nearly forty
years ago:--a mere memory:--but yet it is things like these that first
come to mind when Oxford's name is heard.

And then the scout! How many memories he brings! The college servants
were a race apart with curious standards of their own. It is true they
fattened on the undergraduate. Did not the cook of a certain college
disdain to enter his son at the college for which he cooked, and send
him to Christ Church? Did not each scout bear away all that was left
upon his masters' tables in a vast basket, beneath the weight of which
he could scarcely stagger home? Quite true, but all the same how would
the freshman have fared had not his scout looked after him, seen that he
did what it behoved him to do, and kept him not seldom from some faux
pas? A senior scout had often an almost fatherly regard for the men upon
his staircase. One, who comes at once to mind, would stand and urge and
argue long enough by the bedside of some lazy youth, for whom an
interview with the Dean was imminent, persuading him to get up for
Chapel, and the same man would take it seriously to heart if any of his
particular gentlemen behaved in a manner which he considered unseemly. A
good scout attached himself to his many masters and never forgot them.
If any member of a college revisits his old haunts after years of
absence, the one man who may be depended upon to give him a warm welcome
is his old scout.

Of the tutors and fellows of the colleges, and their frequent kindness
to the junior members of their college, this is not the place to
expatiate. They are of course an intimate part of every man's college
life, and around them many happy memories will generally dwell. The
point that it is desired to emphasize is