ers of
vice-chancellor, doctors, proctors, and convocation, could, by rummaging
up some old statute, have expelled John Brown for paying a visit to
Nottingham, he would have moved the university to strive to effect it.
Happily these powers never are united, or there is no saying what they
might not do. So John remained a member of the college still. The dean
seldom looked at him if he could help it; he tried once the soothing
system by praising him at collections, but it only elicited from John a
polite enquiry after Mr and Mrs Mogg.

What man could do to extricate himself from his unfortunate position,
the dean did. He wrote off immediately to his mother, entreating her, by
her hopes of his advancement in life, not to allow the name of Hodgett
to be any longer contaminated by any touch of linen-drapery. He
suggested that she should at once make over the business to her foreman,
Spriggins, reserving to herself an interest in the profits, and retire
to a small and genteel cottage in the suburbs, where no impertinent
intruder could detect the linen-draper's widow. She, worthy old soul,
though it did grieve her, no doubt, to part with her shop, in which were
centred the interests and associations of so many years, yet would have
set fire to it with her own hands, and emigrated to America--though she
knew it only as a place where banks always broke, and people never paid
their debts--if it could in anyway have furthered his interests whom she
loved better than he deserved. She always looked upon him as a
gentleman, and did not wonder he wished to be one, though she herself
had no manner of taste for becoming a lady.

But in the simplicity of her heart, she planned that even this sacrifice
to her motherly affection might be turned to some account in the way of
trade. Accordingly, there appeared in the _Nottingham Herald_ an
advertisement, extending across two columns, headed with imposing
capitals, by which the public were informed that Mrs Hodgett being about
to decline her long-established linen-drapery business in favour of Mr
Spriggins, the whole stock was to be turned into ready money
immediately, "considerably below prime cost;" by which means the public
had no doubt an opportunity of giving full value to Mrs H. for sundry
old-fashioned patterns and faded remnants, which the incoming Spriggins
would otherwise have "taken to" for a mere song.

Now, since the time that John Brown began first to take so deep an
interes