But when Alec and he were better acquainted, he acknowledged that the oatmeal and whisky were presented to him by relatives, as aids to the difficult task of living for six months on twenty pounds.
Next morning Alec woke to a blinding, acrid, yellow fog, which the gaslight faintly illumined. It was still dark when he emerged into the street and took his way to the College, with a copy of one of Cicero’s orations and a note-book under his arm. As he reached his destination the clock struck eight, and immediately a bell began to tinkle in quick, sharp, imperative tones.
The junior Latin class, he found, met in the centre of a long narrow hall, lit by a few gas-jets flaring here and there. On both sides of the hall were tall windows, outside of which was the yellow cloud of fog. There was no stove or heating apparatus whatever. A raised bench ran along one side of the long room, and there were black empty galleries at either end. In the centre stood a pulpit, raised about two feet above the floor, and in this the Professor was already standing.
About two hundred men and boys were seated in the benches nearest the pulpit, some wearing the regulation red gown, and some without it, while beyond them the black empty benches stretched away to the farther end of the hall, which lay in complete darkness.
All was stillness, but for the tinkling of the bell. Suddenly it stopped, and that instant a janitor banged the door, shutting out late comers inexorably.
Everybody stood up, while the Professor repeated a collect and the Lord’s Prayer in English. Then he began to call the roll in Latin, and as each student answered ‘Adsum!’ he was assigned a place on one of the benches, which was to be his for the rest of the session. Alec’s place was between a stout little fellow of sixteen, son of a wealthy Glasgow merchant, and a pale overworked teacher, who had set his heart on being able to write ‘M.A.’ after his name.
The work of the class then began. The Professor gave a short explanation of the circumstances under which the oration which he had selected was made. He read and translated a few lines, explaining the various allusions, the nature of a Roman trial, and the meaning of the word ‘judices.’ He then, by way of illustrating the method of teaching, called on one of the students to construe a few lines, and proceeded to ask all sorts of questions, historical and philological, passing the questions from man to man and from bench to bench. He then prescribed a piece of English to be turned into Latin prose. Before he had ceased speaking the clock struck; the bell began to ring; the Professor finished his sentence and shut his book. The lecture was at an end.
The next hour Alec spent chiefly in wandering round the College Green, a kind of neglected park thinly populated with soot-encrusted trees, which lay at the rear of the College buildings. At ten o’clock the junior Greek class met; and Alec entered a small room crammed with students, who were sitting on narrow, crescent-shaped benches raised one behind the other, and fronting a semicircular platform at the lower end of the room. The book-boards, Alec noticed, were extremely narrow, and neatly bound with iron. The procedure here was much the same as it had been in the Latin class, except that there were no prayers, the devotions being confined to the classes which happened to meet earliest in the day.
At eleven there was another hour of Latin, Virgil being the text-book this time; and then lectures were over for the day, so far as Alec was concerned.
All day long the committee-rooms of the rival Conservative and Liberal Associations were filled with men, consulting, smoking, enrolling pledges, and inditing ‘squibs’ and manifestoes; and as a Liberal meeting in support of Mr. Sharpe was to be held that evening in the Greek class-room, Alec determined to be present, hoping to hear some arguments which might help him to decide how he ought to vote on this momentous occasion.