, out of his own year, knew him by name.

At the beginning of his second Easter term he began to distinguish
himself. Of all places, he started to do this at the Union--an
institution few of us C---- men belonged to. There was a debate upon
something connected with Education. An unknown person got up and
savagely attacked existing methods as being useless, impracticable, and
in the interests of the teacher and not of the taught. "Of what use to
society is a College fellow?" he asked, and answering, "Of none, except
to reproduce his species," backed up his case with such cleverness that
a majority grew out of nothing. Johnians howled; Trinity men and Hall
men cheered with delight; Non-Colls hissed and made interruptions; and
as the ragged-gowned crowd trooped out, a universal cry went up of,
"Who the devil is he?"

We undergraduates at C---- were not much moved by this exploit,
because, as I have hinted, the Union was not in our line. We rowed and
danced and drove tandem; never preached, except to election mobs. We
quite agreed with Cospatric that Classics and Mathematics, and Natural
Science as she is taught at Cambridge, are one and all of them useless
burdens, not worth the gathering; but we were not prepared to say with
him that we hungered after the acquisition of French, German, Spanish,
Norsk, and Italian, or eke Lingua Franca or Japanese.

The higher authorities saw the matter in a different light. Master and
fellows looked upon Mr. Cospatric as a dangerous heretic--much, in
fact, as Urban VIII. and his cardinals regarded Galileo--and resolved
to make him recant. The senior tutor was chosen as their instrument. He
was an official with what were described as "little ways of his own."
He hauled Cospatric. Union speech and revolutionary sentiments were not
referred to. The delinquent was (amid a cacophony of "Hems") accused,
on the strength of coming up Chapel with surplice unbuttoned, of being
inebriated within the walls of a sacred edifice. He was not allowed to
speak a word in his own defence. He was gated for a week at eight, and
coughed out of the room.

An eminently steady man, and conscious of being at the moment in
question sober as an archangel, the iron of the accusation and
punishment entered into his soul. For gatings as a general thing he
cared not one jot. He had lived his year and a half in an atmosphere of
them. Whether free or chained, he had always stayed in his rooms after
hall, preferring the