words were lost upon him: he went up to his room, and threw himself,
without taking off his clothes, upon his bed. No sleep came to him, and
in the morning--damp, weary, and feverish as he had been--his look was
inexpressibly pitiable and haggard.

The imperious demands of health forced him to take some notice of his
condition; and he was about to put on clean clothes, and take some warm
tea about ten in the morning, when the Master's servant came to tell him
that the Seniority desired his presence.

He at once knew that it must be for his irregularity of the previous
night, which, in the agitation of other thoughts, had not occurred to
him before. He remembered, too, that the Senior Dean had only recently
threatened him that, in consequence of his late misdoings, the next
offence would be visited with summary and final punishment.

Kennedy received rather hard treatment at the hand of the Senior Dean,
who was a very worthy and excellent man, but so firm and punctilious
that he could neither conceive nor tolerate the existence of beings less
precise in their nature than himself. Kind and well-intentioned, he was
utterly unfit for the guidance of young men, because he was totally
deficient in those invaluable qualities--sympathy and tact. He had
early taken a dislike to Kennedy, in consequence of some very harmless
frivolities of his freshman's year. Kennedy, in his frolicsome and
happy moods, had, in ways, childish, perhaps, but completely harmless,
offended the sensitive dignity of the college official, and these
trivial eccentricities the Dean regarded as heinous faults--the symptoms
of a reckless and irreverent character. There was one particular
transaction which gave him more than usual offence, in which Kennedy,
hearing a very absurd story at a don's party, while the Dean was
present, parodied it with such exquisite humour and such complete
command of countenance, that all the other men, in spite of the official
presence, had indecorously broken into fits of laughter. It is a great
pity when rulers and teachers take such terrible fright at little
outbreaks of mere animal and boyish spirits.

The Dean was inclined therefore from the first to take the most serious
view of Kennedy's proceedings, even when they were not as questionable
as recently they had been. Instead of trying to enter into a young
man's feelings and temptations with consideration and forbearance, the
Dean regarded them from a moral wat