"So much for our work and hours. Now for the place. Well, it's a
grand old place, certainly; and I dare say, if a fellow goes
straight in it, and gets creditably through his three years, he
may end by loving it as much as we do the old school-house and
quadrangle at Rugby. Our college is a fair specimen: a venerable
old front of crumbling stone fronting the street, into which two
or three other colleges look also. Over the gateway is a large
room, where the college examinations go on, when there are any;
and, as you enter, you pass the porters lodge, where resides our
janitor, a bustling little man, with a pot belly, whose business
it is to put down the time at which the men come in at night, and
to keep all discommonsed tradesmen, stray dogs, and bad
characters generally, out of the college.

"The large quadrangle into which you come first, is bigger than
ours at Rugby, and a much more solemn and sleepy sort of a place,
with its gables and old mullioned windows. One side is occupied
by the hall and chapel; the principal's house takes up half
another side; and the rest is divided into staircases, on each of
which are six or eight sets of rooms, inhabited by us
undergraduates, and here and there a tutor or fellow dropped down
amongst us (in the first-floor rooms, of course), not exactly to
keep order, but to act as a sort of ballast. This quadrangle is
the show part of the college, and is generally respectable and
quiet, which is a good deal more than can be said for the inner
quadrangle, which you get at through a passage leading out of the
other. The rooms ain't half so large or good in the inner quad;
and here's where all we freshmen live, besides a lot of the older
undergraduates who don't care to change their rooms. Only one
tutor has rooms here; and I should think, if he's a reading man,
it won't be long before he clears out; for all sorts of high
jinks go on on the grass-plot, and the row on the staircases is
often as bad, and not half so respectable, as it used to be in
the middle passage in the last week of the half-year.

"My rooms are what they call garrets, right up in the roof, with
a commanding view of the college tiles and chimney pots, and of
houses at the back. No end of cats, both college Toms and
strangers, haunt the neighbourhood, and I am rapidly learning
cat-talking from them; but I'm not going to stand it--I don't
want to know cat-talk. The college Toms are protected by the
statutes, I believe