green-labelled books to any other evening
companionship.

But to this present confinement, a piece of obviously rank injustice,
he determined not to submit; and in consequence spent a dreary evening
parading the streets, not arriving back till close upon twelve.

He kept in College. The porter sent up his name. He was again hauled,
and again, without being allowed to say a word in his own defence,
gated for the remainder of the term, and given to understand that he
would be sent down for good if he cut a single gate.

The sentence was barbarous. A call at the Lodge and a patient
explanation to the Master would probably have set matters right. But
Cospatric was not the man such a course would occur to. Some
long-slumbering demon rose within him, and he indulged heavily in
College Audit in hall. Afterwards he came to my rooms, where there was
a conclave of some sort going on, and made a statement. It was his
first recorded appearance in any one's quarters but his own, and his
first recorded look of excitement, and consequently his words were
listened to. He did not stay long. He told us in forcible language that
as the College authorities had seen fit to take it out of him, he
intended to do the like by them, and we might form ourselves into
umpires of the proceedings. Then he departed, and next morning joined a
knot of us who were gazing with admiration at the stone angels beside
the clock, who, during the hours of darkness, had been helmeted with
obscene earthenware. No ladder in the College could reach that
decorated statuary, and as the porter did not see fit to risk
_his_ neck over such a ghastly climb, decorated they stayed till
mid-day, and our court teemed with ribald undergraduates.

The succeeding morning there was another raree-show. The College
skeleton--framework of a long-passed don, so tradition stated--had
been, by help of a screwdriver and patience, untombed from its dusty
resting-place at the top of the Hall staircase. It had been dressed in
some flashy Scotch tweeds well known as belonging to the junior tutor,
and perched astride of the weather-cock. Again the position was
impregnable, and again the trophy drew delighted crowds till long past
mid-day.

And so one puerile outrage succeeded another, scarcely a day passing
without some new triumph of the kind to report. Cospatric leaped at one
bound into a public character. Of course every soul in the place knew
that he was at the bottom of it all--