Max Pemberton

“ Your conscience is easy at any rate; and when you stroll into your keeping-room presently you are in that happy state of mind which tolerates even a tailor's dun. And why should you not be? Are not your windows open to the sweet breezes of the day? is there not a sparkle and glitter of morning light upon the painted windows of the chapel opposite? ”

“ The dun sighs, looks at the cake hungrily, shakes his head, picks up his hat and umbrella, descends the stairs. There is age in his footstep; but you lose the sound of that quickly in the shout of laughter which follows him to the gate!
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If May be a term of duns, it is also a term of dinners. There is something delightful in entertaining the many pretty girls who give such welcome colour to your courts and rooms, who are so easily pleased, who make heroes so readily. Then is the time to fill your fireplace with the choicest blossoms ”

“ Such a man is worse than a snowstorm on the "backs." Be your illusion perfect, he will break it. When you are asking to be left alone with the moonlight, and the black shadows, and the silhouetted shape of spire and tower, and the peace of the gardens, and the harvest of night, his tongue is like a saw upon your nerves. Seek rather the man of reserved reflection, the man whose thought is deep and silent, whose only exclamation between the Bridge of Sighs and the Mill is the profound and serious demand that you will heave him the tobacco. ”

“ As the day grows, and the bells cease to ring, and the sunbeams are left in possession of the lecture-rooms, the whole town seems to fill with beflannelled men—some with rackets, some with tennis bats, many with the "cricketer's carpet," a few with golfer's tools—they pass to the playing-fields, and all life is hushed in the streets. Cambridge nods then; she will awake again when the chapel bell rings for evensong and the butlers flock to halls and butteries. Our typical man, meanwhile, will have lunched right well ”

“ Now is the time too for the latent devilry of man to be released. Authority seems blown to the winds; even deans may crack a joke and laugh at it; but woe betide that undergraduate who oversteps the unbeaten bounds. A leading Q.C. of the present day—one of the most brilliant and humorous and popular—had his career cut short at Cambridge by a momentary forgetfulness of this simple law—that so far shall you go and no further. It chanced that there was a great function in Trinity to which only masters of arts were admitted. ”

“ No longer does a placid smile of welcome hover upon the tailor's anxious face. He knows that his man may go down for good at the end of the May term, and then where shall he seek that "twenty-four, sixteen, three" he has waited for so patiently? Now is the time for him to be up and doing. He must hunt his man with human dogs every day, send hourly to his rooms, pursue him, harass him, threaten him. I knew one man at Paul's who could not live in his own rooms during his last May. ”

“ I have endeavoured to give a picture of an average day at Cambridge in the May term. It would be unfair, at the same time, to cover up the shadows which sometimes gather upon such a scene. For the most part they are the shadows of duns. If a man be in his third year, he will have lived long enough to have made a complete and accurate study of the tailor's heart. ”

“ You, lying in your bed and reflecting whether your breakfast shall be soles à la maître or devilled kidneys, may assume that some subtle influence is working upon you so that you are really imbibing, through the medium of the lecturer's hat, an amazing amount of knowledge. ”

“ To-day that same youth is big in law, a man respected of men, a bountiful humorist, an excellent fellow. When it falls to him to go up to his old college and there be toasted at a banquet, he is apt to address the same master who sent him down so many years ago, and to refer touchingly to those old days when "Doctor X and I went arm in arm in procession through the court of Trinity." How the dons chuckle, how their eyes twinkle at a picture so grotesque! ”

“ The tragedy is forgotten. Down goes the worn black hat, down goes the umbrella; the man's hands tremble while they turn over the leaves of the pocket-book he produces. We on our part fall to an expectant silence. ”

“ A man needs to have left the 'Varsity some years if dons are to laugh at his exploits. The May term does not always breed smiles and boyish laughter and mutual toleration. I have in my mind a scene at the end of one May term when a daring youth of my own college danced all night in Hall—the occasion was the college ball—and then, instead of going soberly to breakfast when dawn came, took it into his head to climb a famous gate and to sit astride the top of it. ”

“ Possibly an anxious tutor may suggest that he should attend at least three lectures a week, but this need not disturb him. There are always the wretched tripos men driven by the spurs of ambition to listen to obvious propositions expounded in stuffy lecture-rooms. These men, being good fellows, will take your card and leave it in the lecturer's hat each morning. ”

“ It is rather hard on a man to be told before a number of pretty girls that he is cussing and swearing like anything, especially when an entrée, which ought to lie upon his chest, is still warming in the college kitchens. But then the servants who wait at your table in the May term are altogether a lottery. I remember on one occasion being compelled to get in a man from outside to assist at a little dinner I gave in college. My regular gyp was dancing attendance upon the dons, but he sent me a waiter who, he assured me, was "a capital 'and, sir." ”

“ This gate is very old and very high and very formidable. It possesses for its summit a cupola surmounted by a cross of stone, resembling nothing so much as those crosses and pulpits which our forefathers erected in market-places and at the doors of cathedral churches. How a man ever managed to climb such a gate, heaven only knows ”

“ And you can read, be it remembered, propping up your paper with Justinian, or sharing a review and alternate slices of an excellent devil. And when breakfast is done how pleasant to sit at your window and watch the men who have been to lecture and ask them if they have enjoyed themselves. ”