ty in keeping our minds on the problems set down. Outside
is a blue sky, the roar of traffic at the confluence of four great
thoroughfares, and the call of London, a very siren among cities, when
one knows! Over yonder, a cigarette in his mouth, his head on his hand
and his elbow asprawl on the desk, making idle marks with a pencil, is
a youth who is nursing a grievance against the government. He has been
up eight times and failed every time. He is going up again with us
next Tuesday. Yet, as it has been whispered to me during lunch hour by
my neighbour, a robust individual just home from Rangoon, he is a
first-class man; just the chap in a break-down; always on the job;
fine record. There is another, between us and the sectional model of
a feed pump valve, who never looks up, but figures unceasingly with
elbows close to his sides, his toes turned in, the nape of an
obstinate, close-cropped neck glistening pale gold and pink in the
morning sun. Without having been to sea with this party or even having
seen his face, one is aware that he will always be found with his pale
eyes wide open when the light is flicked on at One Bell. He has been
sometime in tramp-steamers, who carry no oilers, for there is a hard
callous on the knuckle of his right forefinger where the oil-feeder
handle has been chafing. Whether he would be a tower of strength in a
smash-up is not so easily divined. Next to him a young gentleman is
sitting sideways smoking, a pair of handsome cuff-buttons of Indian
design flashing at his wrists. He is, my neighbour has informed me
during lunch, from the P. & O. and he corroborates this by asking a
question of the lecturer concerning a broken valve-spindle of enormous
dimensions. He stands for class in our community and gives a certain
tone to the group who go up on Tuesday. Unhappily he falls out on
the second day, owing to certain defects in his arithmetic, and
disappears. No doubt he has gone to another sea-port to try a less
austere examiner.

And after lunch, the principal of Teague's School of Engineering
suddenly emerges from his private office, hangs up a card labelled
"_No Smoking during Lectures_" and proceeds to feed us with the
irreducible minimum of information necessary for our ordeal. By long
practice, astute contriving, and careful cross-examination of
successful pupils he has arrived at such a pass that he seems to know
more about the examiner's mind than that gentleman himself. He repeats
slo