How can any boy fail to feel an ecstasy of pleasure on first finding himself in rooms which he knows for the next few years are to be his castle?  Here he will not be compelled to turn out of the most comfortable place as soon as he has ensconced himself in it because papa or mamma happens to come into the room, and he should give it up to them.  The most cosy chair here is for himself, there is no one even to share the room with him, or to interfere with his doing as he likes in it—­smoking included.  Why, if such a room looked out both back and front on to a blank dead wall it would still be a paradise, how much more then when the view is of some quiet grassy court or cloister or garden, as from the windows of the greater number of rooms at Oxford and Cambridge.

Theobald, as an old fellow and tutor of Emmanuel—­at which college he had entered Ernest—­was able to obtain from the present tutor a certain preference in the choice of rooms; Ernest’s, therefore, were very pleasant ones, looking out upon the grassy court that is bounded by the Fellows’ gardens.

Theobald accompanied him to Cambridge, and was at his best while doing so.  He liked the jaunt, and even he was not without a certain feeling of pride in having a full-blown son at the University.  Some of the reflected rays of this splendour were allowed to fall upon Ernest himself.  Theobald said he was “willing to hope”—­this was one of his tags—­that his son would turn over a new leaf now that he had left school, and for his own part he was “only too ready”—­this was another tag—­to let bygones be bygones.

Ernest, not yet having his name on the books, was able to dine with his father at the Fellows’ table of one of the other colleges on the invitation of an old friend of Theobald’s; he there made acquaintance with sundry of the good things of this life, the very names of which were new to him, and felt as he ate them that he was now indeed receiving a liberal education.  When at length the time came for him to go to Emmanuel, where he was to sleep in his new rooms, his father came with him to the gates and saw him safe into college; a few minutes more and he found himself alone in a room for which he had a latch-key.

From this time he dated many days which, if not quite unclouded, were upon the whole very happy ones.  I need not however describe them, as the life of a quiet steady-going undergraduate has been told in a score of novels better than I can tell it.  Some of Ernest’s schoolfellows came up to Cambridge at the same time as himself, and with these he continued on friendly terms during the whole of his college career.  Other schoolfellows were only a year or two his seniors; these called on him, and he thus made a sufficiently favourable entree into college life.  A straightforwardness of character that was stamped upon his face, a love of humour, and a temper which was more easily appeased than ruffled made up for some awkwardness and want of savoir faire.  He soon became a not unpopular member of the best set of his year, and though neither capable of becoming, nor aspiring to become, a leader, was admitted by the leaders as among their nearer hangers-on.