"What have I done, Mr. Dean: be pleased to tell me."
"Why, sir, the porter states that this is the fifth time you have not come into college until past twelve o'clock."
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Dean; there is some mistake: for I have never once been later than ten."
"Then, Mr. Tupper, somebody must have given your name in the dark: and I request that you will do your best to discover who did this, and report it to me."
As I failed to do it, after some days, again the Dean sent for me; and finding after question made that I pretty well guessed the delinquent but declined to expose him, the Dean kindly added--"This does you credit, sir," and I left. A few days passed, and I was brought up again with "I think you are intended for the Church, Mr. Tupper." As well as I could manage it, I stammered out that it was impossible, as I could not speak. Then he said he was sorry for that, as he meant to nominate me for a studentship. This, however, never came to pass, and so the matter dropped; until Dean Gaisford succeeded Dean Smith, and Joseph lost his Pharaoh.
At college I lived the quiet life of a reading-man; though I varied continually the desk and the book with the "constitutional" up Headington Hill, or the gallop with Mr. Murrell's harriers, or the quick scull to Iffley, or the more perilous sailing in a boat (no wonder that Isis claims her annual victims), or the gig to Blenheim or Newton-Courtnay,--or that only once alarming experience of a tandem when the leader turned round and looked at me in its nostalgic longing to return home,--or the geological ramble with Dr. Buckland's class,--or the botanic searchings for wild rarities with some naturalist pundit whose name I have forgotten; and so forth. In matters theological, I was strongly opposed to the Tractarians, especially denouncing Newman and Pusey for their dishonest "non-naturalness" and Number Ninety: and I favoured with my approval (_valeat quantum_) Dr. Hampden. I attended Dr. Kidd's anatomical lectures, and dabbled with some chemical experiments--which when Knighton and I repeated at his father's house, 9 Hanover Square, the baronet in future blew us up to the astonishment of the baronet _in præsenti_, his famous father. Also, I was a diligent student in the Algebraic class of Dr. Short, afterwards the good Bishop of St. Asaph; and I have before me now a _memoria technica_ of mine in rhyme giving the nine chief rules of trigonometry, but not easily producible here as full of "sines and cosines, arcs, chords, tangents, and radii," though helpful to memory, and humorous at the time, ending with