After inquiring carefully of my gyp the way into hall, the particular table at which I was to sit, and all the etiquettes, not to be conversant with which is to a freshman the very fiend’s arch mock—after taking especial care not to put on my trencher wrong side before, and to arrange my gown in what I imagined to be a very devil-may-care fashion, forth I went, with about as pleasant a prospect as the gallows before me, but without the despairing pluck which enables the poor culprit to face that prospect manfully.
On I went, with my courage screwed to the sticking place, but I must confess with my heart thumping against my ribs prodigiously, when immediately under the low-browed archway—I have not seen it these twenty years and better; yet there it stands as palpable before me as if it were not a trick of memory—the low-browed archway giving access by an ascending stair to the hall redolent of six year old mutton, and by a descending flight to the college butteries and cellars, redolent of audit ale, and that most cloud-compelling compound, of hot ale, sherry, brandy, cloves, nutmegs, toast and cinnamon, which gods call nectar, and college men Caius copus—when under that low-browed archway, I say, of what should I become aware, but of my tall friend of the Highflyer, arrayed like myself in a cap and gown, which testified by their resplendent newness that he too was a freshman.
No words can, I believe, adequately describe the mutual delight of that recognition. He, it appears, was in precisely the same predicament with myself! He, like myself, had remained ensconced in his own rooms, not daring to stir out and meet the animadverting eyes of junior and senior sophomores, until the summons of the dinner-bell, and the yet more imperative commands of an esurient stomach had driven him out, as they have many a hero both before and since, to do and dare the worst.
Instead then of a morose and stately Don, steeped to the lips in scorn of verdant youngsters, each of us had before him an innocent, and equally imperilled, brother freshman. Confound all etiquette! there was no one near to see! so out went both our hands at once!
“Believe I had the pleasure of traveling from the north—”
“Think we came up together in the Highflyer—”
“Devilish little pleasure about it, however,” said I, Frank Forester, mustering a little of the spice of the original fiend that possesses me.
“Deuced dull work it was, certainly, but, my dear sir, I took you for a Don.”
“And I you—and for a mighty stiff one too.”
“To tell you the truth,” said the North Briton, “I have been thanking Heaven all the morning that I should never see that sulky little fellow again.”