st two or
three terms; they were so very unattractive a domicile, that the last
Freshman to whom they were offered, as a Hobson's choice, was currently
reported, in the plenitude of his disgust, to have take his name off the
books _instanter_. It is not usual to allow strangers to sleep within
college walls at all; but our discipline was somewhat lax in those days.
So Mr Carey had a bed put up for him in the aforesaid quarters. He was,
of course, duly _feted_, and made much of by Horace and his friends; and
a dozen of us sat down to a capital dinner in the rooms of the former,
on the strength of having to entertain a "stranger from the country;"
the hospitality of Oxford relaxing its rules even in favour of
under-graduates upon such occasions. It must have been somewhere towards
the next morning, when two or three of us accompanied young Carey down
to No. 8; and, after chatting with him till he was half undressed, left
him, as we thought, safe and quiet. However, soon after we had retired,
some noisy individual in the same staircase thought proper to give a
view-hollo out of his window, for the purpose of wishing the public
good-night. Now there was one of the Fellows, a choleric little old
gentleman, always in residence, holding some office, in which there was
as little to do, and as much to get as might be, and who seldom troubled
himself much about college discipline, and looked upon under-graduates
with a sort of silent contempt; never interfering with them, as he
declared himself, so long as they did not interfere with him. But one
point there was, in which they did interfere with his personal comfort
occasionally, and whereby his peace of mind and rest of body were
equally disturbed. Mr Perkins always took a tumbler of negus at ten
precisely, and turned in as the college clock struck the quarter past;
by the half-hour he was generally asleep, for his digestion was good,
and his cares few. But his slumbers were not heavy, and any thing like a
row in the quadrangle infallibly awoke him, and then he was like a lion
roused. He was wont to jump up, throw up his window, thrust out a red
face and a white nightcap, and after listening a few seconds for the
chance of the odious sounds being repeated, would put the very pertinent
question usual in such circumstances, to which one so seldom gets an
equally pertinent reply--"Who's that?" In case this intimation of Mr
Perkins being wide awake proved sufficient, as it often did,