use to turn out in cold weather; that they do
not turn out in wet weather; that when the weather is really fine,
it is impossible to get them together; that the slightest
counter-attraction,--a hockey match, a sacred concert,--goes to their
heads at once.

There was a time when I was the newly appointed occupant of a college
chair and had to address the Owl's Club. It is a penalty that all new
professors pay; and the Owls batten upon them like bats. It is one of
the compensations of age that I am free of the Owl's Club forever. But
in the days when I still had to address them, I used to take it out of
the Owls in a speech, delivered, in imagination only and not out loud,
to the assembled meeting of the seventeen Owls, after the chairman had
made his concluding remarks. It ran as follows:

"Gentlemen--if you are such, which I doubt. I realise that the paper
which I have read on 'Was Hegel a deist?' has been an error. I spent
all the winter on it and now I realise that not one of you pups know who
Hegel was or what a deist is. Never mind. It is over now, and I am glad.
But just let me say this, only this, which won't keep you a minute. Your
chairman has been good enough to say that if I come again you will get
together a capacity audience to hear me. Let me tell you that if your
society waits for its next meeting till I come to address you again, you
will wait indeed. In fact, gentlemen--I say it very frankly--it will be
in another world."

But I pass over the audience. Suppose there is a real audience, and
suppose them all duly gathered together. Then it becomes the business of
that gloomy gentleman--facetiously referred to in the newspaper reports
as the "genial chairman"--to put the lecturer to the bad. In nine cases
out of ten he can do so. Some chairmen, indeed, develop a great gift for
it. Here are one or two examples from my own experience:

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the chairman of a society in a little
country town in Western Ontario, to which I had come as a paid (a very
humbly paid) lecturer, "we have with us tonight a gentleman" (here he
made an attempt to read my name on a card, failed to read it and put the
card back in his pocket)--"a gentleman who is to lecture to us on" (here
he looked at his card again)--"on Ancient Ancient,--I don't very well
see what it is--Ancient--Britain? Thank you, on Ancient Britain. Now,
this is the first of our series of lectures for this winter. The last
series, as you a