ear from a dish in front of me, but Learoyd persuaded me not to throw
it. I couldn't have missed Lambert, and I think he deserved to be
mobbed, but he saw what was happening and I think it made him forget
some of the things he was going to say about me. At the end of his
speech he actually began to recite a piece of poetry of his own, though
the first line was about the brave deserving the fair and sounded like
somebody else's, which was a way his poems had. He had arranged for
slow music to be turned on while he did this, and there was such a
general feeling against the combination that he had to sit down before
he had finished. Bunny Langham, who was a member of the Horace Club,
and disliked any poems made in Oxford except those which he wrote
himself, led the hubbub, and after we had drunk Jack's health there was
such a noise that he escaped having to reply. When any one shouted for
him, as they did fitfully for some time, their voices were always
drowned in the general cheerfulness of the evening, and he finally came
round from the other side of the table and sat down by me.

"You have been making a most awful row," he said.

"Self-defence," I answered, "I didn't want to hear anything which
Dennison said."

"A most rotten evening, the proggins will come in a few minutes if he
is within shouting distance. They have been trying to get us out for
the last quarter of an hour."

"Several men seem to have gone already."

We talked for some minutes, and then a waiter came in and said the
proctor was coming down "The High," so we all bolted as hard as we
could. Instead of turning down the Turl, I saw Dennison run down the
High, with Lambert pursuing him and telling him to stop. But Dennison
had been careful during the last part of the evening, and had arrived
at the state when any one shouting at him made him run all the faster,
while Lambert, excited by oratory and the after-effects of it, declared
very loudly that he would catch Dennison if he had to run a mile.

"Dennison thinks that the proggins and all his bulldogs are after him,"
Bunny Langham said; "the whole thing was only a trick to get us out
before anything happened."

"They can catch me if they like," Ward replied, "I can't run to-night."

So the three of us walked back to St. Cuthbert's, and Bunny complained
bitterly that he could not come in and wait until Lambert and Dennison
turned up. The first man to come into college after us was Collier,