the dons getting the news through
the gyps--but no one in authority was smart enough to bring anything
home to him. He even took to keeping lectures and chapels, which piece
of pharisaism put, to our mind then, the finishing touch of this comedy
of revenge.

It all seems a great piece of foolery when one looks back, but at the
time we thought it high-minded and justifiable rebellion. We assembled
in the court, and cheered after the senior tutor had been three parts
smothered in his bed by a red-pepper squib dropped down the chimney;
and on the morning after the Master's laundry was raided, and the linen
(belonging to both sexes) distributed amongst the crows' nests in the
avenue, I think special trains must have been running into Cambridge,
so thick was the throng of sight-seers.

There is no doubt about it that Cospatric came to be a young man of
much renown in those days.

Had he been a popular person beforehand, far-seeing friends would have
advised him to retire on his laurels after, say, the first half-dozen
exploits. But as it was, there was no one amongst the newly-formed
acquaintances sufficiently interested in the hero of the moment to
forgo his own personal anticipations of enjoyment. The man was egged on
unthinkingly, although a moment's thought must have pointed to a
certain deluge ahead.

And that deluge came, as usual, from an unlooked-for quarter.

Cospatric, in all his sober senses, was helping an overcome roisterer
across the court late at night. The junior tutor arrived, and ordered
Cospatric to his rooms. Cospatric went obediently, waited in the shadow
of an archway, and returned to the overcome one. Enter once more the
junior tutor; nothing said to the roisterer; Cospatric to pay an
official call at twelve-thirty on the morrow. There is no use giving
detail. They had a College meeting next day, and sent him down for an
offence that was absolutely trivial; and every soul in the College, the
culprit included, saw the justice of the injustice.

He came down the steps from the Combination room in triumph, and we
chaired him round the court in a bath, some hundred and twenty men
forming in procession behind, and singing an idiotic march-song from a
current burlesque. Then we went to his rooms, and he sat on two tables,
one above the other, with a tea-cosy on his head, and held an auction
of his effects, which those of us who happened to possess any ready
cash bought up at long figures. He had no pl