It is nothing for him to quit sleep at the first tinkling of the alarm-clock that hangs in your chamber, or to brave the weather in that cheerless run to the morning prayers of winter.  Yet with what a dreamy horror you wake on mornings of snow to that tinkling alarum!—­and glide in the cold and darkness under the shadow of the college-walls, shuddering under the sharp gusts that come sweeping between the buildings,—­and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary chapel!  You follow half unconsciously some tutor’s rhetorical reading of a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish, your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the cover of the big book, and his head leaning slightly to one side, runs through in gentle and tremulous tones his wonted form of invocation.

Your Division room is steaming with foul heat, and there is a strong smell of burnt feathers and oil.  A jaunty tutor with pug nose and consequential air steps into the room—­while you all rise to show him deference—­and takes his place at the pulpit-like desk.  Then come the formal loosing of his camlet cloak-clasp,—­the opening of his sweaty Xenophon to where the day’s parasangs begin,—­the unsliding of his silver pencil-case,—­the keen, sour look around the benches, and the cool pinch of his thumb and forefinger into the fearful box of names!

How you listen for each as it is uttered,—­running down the page in advance,—­rejoicing when some hard passage comes to a stout man in the corner; and what a sigh of relief—­on mornings after you have been out late at night—­when the last paragraph is reached, the ballot drawn, and—­you, safe!

You speculate dreamily upon the faces around you.  You wonder what sort of schooling they may have had, and what sort of homes.  You think one man has got an extraordinary name, and another a still more extraordinary nose.  The glib, easy way of one student, and his perfect sang-froid, completely charm you:  you set him down in your own mind as a kind of Crichton.  Another weazen-faced, pinched-up fellow in a scant cloak, you think must have been sometime a schoolmaster:  he is so very precise, and wears such an indescribable look of the ferule.  There is one big student, with a huge beard and a rollicking good-natured eye, whom you would quite like to see measure strength with your old usher, and on careful comparison rather think the usher would get the worst of it.  Another appears as venerable as some fathers you have seen; and it seems wonderfully odd that a man old enough to have children should recite Xenophon by morning candle-light!