he meeting had
finished. I was sitting by the window looking down on the people who
had been in the hall, and nearly everybody had gone out of St.
Aldgate's when Bunny came up to me and said he thought he should make a
short speech. He went away and came back with a horn, which he blew so
lustily that in two or three minutes he had collected a small crowd in
front of the house.

"They are not enough," he said, and he blew on his horn until I should
think fifty or sixty people were standing in the street. Then he put
his head out of the window and shouted, "Silence. I will, if you will
permit me, say a few words to you on burning questions of the day."
The crowd was almost entirely made up of loafers from the town, and
they received him with loud cries of approval.

"Fellow-citizens of Oxford," he began, and was told at once to speak
up, and asked if his mother knew he was out and other ancient
questions, which interrupted but did not discourage him.

"Fellow-citizens of Oxford," he repeated, "who have assembled in your
thousands----" His next words were drowned by a rude man, with a
blatant voice, telling him that he was a blooming liar.

"Fellow-citizens and burgesses of Oxford, who have assembled in your
thousands to hear--" Bunny began once more, but the rude man shouted
that he was not at a concert, and when he wanted to listen to the same
thing over and over again he was not too shy to say so.

"I shall have to ask you to remove that gentleman, he is mistaking me
for one of his unfortunate family," Bunny shouted back, and was told to
go on and not mind Tom Briggs. It was not possible, however, for him
to make himself heard, and instead of continuing his speech he and Tom
Briggs talked to each other, until some one behind me threw a banana at
Tom and knocked his hat off. At the same moment I saw the proctor and
his bull-dogs coming down the street, and in a minute we had turned out
all the lights in the room and gone up-stairs. There we stayed until
we heard the proctor leave the house.

"That's a bit of luck," said Jack, as we sat down again.

"I can't make out what the deuce has happened," Bunny answered, "he
must have spotted the house."

"Perhaps he didn't want to catch us; after all we were not doing much,"
some man, whose experience of proctors must have been limited, said.

We got back to the room and heard a tremendous booing in the street,
for the crowd, deprived of their fun, were letting