college plate-basket. Mr. Rattle, in his fright, dropped the fair nun of
St. Clement's plump upon the proctor, who could not understand the joke;
but, having recovered ~152~~ his legs, entered the college, and found
one of the fair sisters concealed in Mr. Rattle's room, take notice.
In consequence he was next day pulled up before the big wigs, when,
refusing to make a suitable apology, he received sentence of expulsion,
take notice." "He must have been a genius," quoth I, "and a very
eccentric one too, from the relics he has left behind of his favourite
propensities." In one corner of the room lay deposited a heap of lumber,
thrown together, as a printer would say, in _pie_, composed of
broken tables, broken bottles, trunks, noseless bellows, books of all
descriptions, a pair of _muffles_, and the cap of sacred academus with a
hole through the crown (emblematical, I should think, of the pericranium
it had once covered), and stuck upon the leg of a broken chair. The
rats, those very agreeable visitors of ancient habitations, were
seen scampering away upon our entrance, and the ceiling was elegantly
decorated with the smoke of a candle in a great variety of ornamented
designs, consisting of caricatures of dignitaries and the Christian
names of favourite damsels. There was poor Cicero, with a smashed crown,
turned upside down in the fire-place, and a map of Oxford hanging in
tatters above it; a portrait of Tom Crib was in the space adjoining the
window, not one whole pane of which had survived the general wreck; but
what most puzzled me was the appearance of the cupboard door: the bottom
hinge had given way, and it hung suspended by one joint in an oblique
direction, exhibiting, on an inside face, a circle chalked for a target
and perforated with numerous holes This door was in a right line with
the bedroom, and, when thrown open, covered a loop-hole of a window
that looked across the quadrangle directly into the principal's
apartments.{1}

[Illustration: page153]

~153~~ It was in this way (as Mark informed me) my predecessor amused
himself in a morning by lying in bed and firing at the target, till,
unhappily, on one occasion the ball passed through a hole in the door,
the loop-hole window, and, crossing the quadrangle, entered whizzing
past the dignitary's ear and that of his family who were at breakfast
with him into the back of the chair he had but a moment before
providentially quitted to take a book from his libra