ession from leading members of influential
congregations. Others were preparing with painful shrinking of heart to
tread the weary and humiliating "trail of the black bag," while others
again, to whom had come visions of high deeds and sounds of distant
battle, were making ready outfits supposed to be suitable for life and
work in the great West, or in the far lands across the sea.

Two high functions of college life yet remained, one, the Presbytery
examination, the other, Professor Macdougall's student party. The
annual examination before Presbytery was ever an event of nerve-racking
uncertainty. It might prove to be an entirely perfunctory performance of
the most innocuous kind. On the other hand, it might develop features of
a most sensational and perilous nature. The college barometer this year
was unusually depressed, for rumour had gone abroad that the Presbytery
examination was to be of the more serious type. It was a time of
searchings of heart for those who had been giving, throughout the
session, undue attention to the social opportunities afforded by college
life, and more especially if they had allowed their contempt for the
archaic and oriental to become unnecessarily pronounced. To these
latter gentlemen the day brought gloomy forebodings. Even their morning
devotions, which were marked by unusual sincerity and earnestness,
failed to bring them that calmness of mind which these exercises are
supposed to afford. For their slender ray of hope that their memory
of the English text might not fail them in the hour of trial was very
materially clouded by the dread that in their embarrassment they might
assign a perfectly correct English version to the wrong Hebrew text. The
result of such mischance they would not allow themselves to contemplate.
On the other hand, however, there was the welcome possibility that they
might be so able to dispose themselves among the orientalists in their
class that a word dropped at a critical moment might save them from this
mischance. And there was the further, and not altogether unreal, ground
of confidence, that the examiner himself might be uneasily conscious of
the ever-present possibility that some hidden Hebrew snag might rudely
jag a hole in his own vessel while sailing the mare ignotum of oriental
literature. Of course, the examination would also include other
departments of sacred learning, for it was the province and duty of
Presbytery to satisfy itself as to the sound