top of being told that I had "a fair old head," compelled me to say
something.

"One to Marten," Lambert said, as he stalked about the room; they were
a most trying lot to have anything to do with. Everything they said
was just the thing that made me want to get away from them, and
Dennison had told me once that he considered conversation a very fine
art.

It would have been wise of me to have gone away without waiting for
Dennison's attempts to get level with me, but I felt like staying where
I was.

"Poor old fellow," Dennison groaned, "he sits up all night, and then
his conscience smites him and his head aches, and he thinks the college
is going to the deuce and is to be saved from perdition by his being
rude. What you want, old chap, is a sedlitz powder; go and have one,
and you won't be so gloomy, you may even smile when you see our eight
bumped to-night."

"You laugh and jeer at our boat when it goes down, but I'll bet you
would be the first to kick up a row if we ever make any bumps again,
though you don't care whether we go to the bottom of the river and stop
there," I answered.

"I don't see that it matters," Lambert put in, "and I would much rather
be bottom than bottom but one or even two, there's something dignified
about being absolutely last."

"Take a sedlitz powder and become a philosopher," Dennison suggested.

"I always thought your philosophy was founded on something confoundedly
odd," I returned, "and now I know all about it."

"I suppose you think that very witty," he replied, and he almost lost
his temper, "but though I may not be much of a philosopher I am a
first-rate doctor, so when a man wants medicine I tell him so."

"Thanks," I said.

"You are on the wrong track," he went on, beginning to smile again,
"the wretched school-boy notion of being sick to death when you are
beaten at anything is all humbug here, the thing to do is to laugh
whatever happens, and to-day you look as if you hadn't a laugh left in
you."

"That's sitting up all night," Lambert said, "you can't laugh all day
and night."

Then I told them that if they wanted to see the college perfectly
useless at everything they must be the biggest fools in Oxford, and I
appealed to Murray to support me, because Dennison never spoke to him
if he could help doing so.

"It is much easier to laugh than it is to row," was all Murray said,
and he went out of the room at once.

"That man's the most complete prig in the 'V