the dressing-room. Certainly, as
they remarked, Chanter could have no possible use for so many
dress boots at once, and it was a pity the beer should be wasted;
but on the whole, perhaps, the materials were never meant for
combination, and had better have been kept apart. Others had gone
away to break into the kitchen, headed by one who had just come
into college and vowed he would have some supper; and others, to
screw up an unpopular tutor, or to break into the rooms of some
inoffensive freshman. The remainder mustered on the grass in the
quadrangle, and began playing leap-frog and larking one another.
Amongst these last was our hero, who had been at Blake's wine and
one of the quieter supper parties; and, though not so far gone as
most of his companions, was by no means in a state in which he
would have cared to meet the Dean. He lent his hearty aid
accordingly to swell the noise and tumult, which was becoming
something out of the way even for St. Ambrose's. As the leap-frog
was flagging, Drysdale suddenly appeared carrying some silver
plates which were used on solemn occasions in the common room,
and allowed to be issued on special application for
gentlemen-commoners' parties. A rush was made towards him.

"Halloa, here's Drysdale with lots of swag," shouted one.

"What are you going to do with it?" cried another.

Drysdale paused a moment with the peculiarly sapient look of a
tipsy man who has suddenly lost the thread of his ideas, and then
suddenly broke out with--

"Hang it! I forgot. But let's play at quoits with them."

The proposal was received with applause, and the game began, but
Drysdale soon left it. He had evidently some notion in his head
which would not suffer him to turn to anything else till he had
carried it out. He went off accordingly to Chanter's rooms, while
the quoits went on in the front quadrangle.

About this time, however, the Dean and bursar, and the tutors who
lived in college, began to be conscious that something unusual
was going on. They were quite used to distant choruses, and great
noises in the men's rooms, and to a fair amount of shouting and
skylarking in the quadrangle, and were long-suffering men, not
given to interfering, but there must be an end to all endurance,
and the state of things which had arrived could no longer be met
by a turn in bed and a growl at the uproars and follies of
undergraduates.

Presently some of the rioters on the grass caught sight of a
figu