ng like time if by chance they should
be caught wandering abroad at cock-crow. Mixed with these there were
ghastly libels on the human form divine, which Mac had brought home from
the students' atelier--ladies and gentlemen who appeared to find it
somewhat cold, and had therefore thoughtfully provided themselves with a
tight-fitting coat of white-wash. Mac said this was the way that
flesh-colour was painted under direct illumination. Well, it might have
been. We did not set up for judges. But to an inexperienced eye they
looked a great deal more like deceased white-washed persons who had been
dug up after some weeks' decent burial. We observed that they appeared
to be mildewed in patches, but Mac explained that these were the
muscles. This also was possible; but, all the same, we had never seen
any ladies or gentlemen who carried their muscles outside, so to speak.
Mac said he did this sort of thing because he was applying for admission
to the Academy Life Class. We all hoped he would get in, for we had had
quite enough of dead people, especially when they were white-washed and
resurrected, besides given to wearing their muscles outside.

Mac used, in addition to this provocation, to play jokes on us, because
Almond and I were harmless and quiet. Almond was studying engineering
because he was going to be a wholesale manufacturer of wheelbarrows. I
was an arts student who wrote literary and political articles in the
office of a moribund newspaper all night, and wakened in time to go
along the street to dine in a theological college.

So Mac used to play off his wicked jokes upon Almond and myself for the
reasons stated. He bored a hole through the wall at the head of our bed,
and awoke us untimeously in the frosty mornings by squirting mysterious
streams of water upon us. He said he had promised Almond's mother to see
that he took a bath every morning, and he was going to do it. He
anticipated us at our tins of sardines, and when we re-opened them we
found all the tails carefully preserved in oil and sawdust. He made
disgraceful caricatures of our physiognomies by falsely representing
that he wished us to sit for our portraits. He perpetrated drawings upon
the backs of our college exercises, mixing them with opprobrious remarks
concerning our preceptors, which we did not observe till our attention
was called to them upon their return by the preceptors themselves. We
bore these things meekly on the whole, for that was our