So much for the casual cribber. The professional—the chronic—exercises an ingenuity, and devotes an amount of time and labour to the perfecting of his craft which, if applied directly to his allotted task, would bring him out at the top of his form. In a little periodical entitled The Light Green, published in Cambridge thirty years ago by a young Johnian named Hilton (who might have rivalled Calverley himself had he lived to maturity), we have a brilliant little portrait of the professional cribber, executed in the style of The Heathen Chinee. It is called The Heathen Passee.
In the crown of his cap
Were the Furies and Fates,
And an elegant map
Of the Dorian States:
And we found in his palms, which were hollow,
What are common in palms—that is dates.
But he is a rare bird, the confirmed cribber, with his algebraical formulæ written on his finger-nails, and history notes attached to unreliable elastic arrangements which shoot up his sleeve out of reach at critical moments. The ordinary boy does not crib unless he is pressed for time or in danger of summary execution. He usually limits his enterprises to co-operative preparation—that is to say, the splitting up an evening's work into sections, each section being prepared by one boy and translated to the other members of the syndicate afterwards—to the gleaning of discarded lines and superfluous tags from the rough copies of cleverer boys' Latin Verses, and to the acceptance of a
whispered "prompt" from a good Samaritan when badly cornered by a question.
But we may note that cribbing is not confined to schoolboys. The full perfection of the art is only attained in the pass-examinations of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Then all considerations of conscience or sportsmanship are flung aside, and the cribber cribs, not to gain distinction or outstrip his rivals, but to get over a troublesome fence by hook or crook and have done with it. There was once a Freshman at Cambridge whose name began with M. This accident of nomenclature placed him during his Little Go examination in the next seat to a burly young man whom he recognised with a thrill of awe as the President of the C.U.B.C., whose devotion to aquatic sports had so far prevented him from clearing the academic fence just mentioned, and who now, at the beginning of his third year, was entering, in company with a collection of pink-faced youths fresh from school, upon his ninth attempt to satisfy the examiners in Part One of the Previous Examination.
Our friend, having completed his first paper, quitted the Senate House and returned to his rooms, to fortify himself with luncheon before
the next. During the progress of that meal a strange gyp called upon him, and proffered a note, mysteriously.
"From Mr. M——, sir," he said, mentioning the name of the Freshman's exalted neighbour in the examination room.
The Freshman opened the note with trembling fingers. Was it possible that he had been singled out as a likely oar already?