Against the wall reposed a bicycle with tennis-racquet buckled to its handle.  A bull-dog bitch, working her snout from side to side, was snuffling horribly; the great iron-studded door to which her chain was fastened stayed immovable.  Through this narrow mouth, human metal had been poured for centuries—­poured, moulded, given back.

“Come along,” said Shelton.

They now entered the Bishop’s Head, and had their dinner in the room where Shelton had given his Derby dinner to four-and-twenty well-bred youths; here was the picture of the racehorse that the wineglass, thrown by one of them, had missed when it hit the waiter; and there, serving Crocker with anchovy sauce, was the very waiter.  When they had finished, Shelton felt the old desire to rise with difficulty from the table; the old longing to patrol the streets with arm hooked in some other arm; the old eagerness to dare and do something heroic—­and unlawful; the old sense that he was of the forest set, in the forest college, of the forest country in the finest world.  The streets, all grave and mellow in the sunset, seemed to applaud this after-dinner stroll; the entrance quad of his old college—­spaciously majestic, monastically modern, for years the heart of his universe, the focus of what had gone before it in his life, casting the shadow of its grey walls over all that had come after-brought him a sense of rest from conflict, and trust in his own important safety.  The garden-gate, whose lofty spikes he had so often crowned with empty water-bottles, failed to rouse him.  Nor when they passed the staircase where he had flung a leg of lamb at some indelicate disturbing tutor, did he feel remorse.  High on that staircase were the rooms in which he had crammed for his degree, upon the system by which the scholar simmers on the fire of cramming, boils over at the moment of examination, and is extinct for ever after.  His coach’s face recurred to him, a man with thrusting eyes, who reeled off knowledge all the week, and disappeared to town on Sundays.

They passed their tutor’s staircase.

“I wonder if little Turl would remember us?” said Crocker; “I should like to see him.  Shall we go and look him up?”

“Little Turl?” said Shelton dreamily.

Mounting, they knocked upon a solid door.

“Come in,” said the voice of Sleep itself.

A little man with a pink face and large red ears was sitting in a fat pink chair, as if he had been grown there.

“What do you want?” he asked of them, blinking.

“Don’t you know me, sir?”

“God bless me!  Crocker, isn’t it?  I didn’t recognise you with a beard.”

Crocker, who had not been shaved since starting on his travels, chuckled feebly.

“You remember Shelton, sir?” he said.

“Shelton?  Oh yes!  How do you do, Shelton?  Sit down; take a cigar”; and, crossing his fat little legs, the little gentleman looked them up and down with drowsy interest, as who should say, “Now, after, all you know, why come and wake me up like this?”