ments which make schoolmasters and tutors
usually so beloved, and learning in all its branches so delightful.

It is not to be wondered at, then, if John's kind friends somewhat
damaged his reputation among the Dons, and watched their opportunity to
annihilate him. It came, and they were down upon him at once. Some
half-dozen noisy men, the survivors of a supper-party, had turned into
Brown's rooms (he seldom sat up so late) for a parting cigar. Having
accomplished this, they took it into their heads to dance a quadrille in
the middle of the covered thoroughfare, for the benefit of the echo, to
the music of six individual tunes sung in chorus. So strange a
performance brought down some of the fellows; the men were not
recognised, but traced to Brown's rooms. He refused to give up their
names--was declared contumacious; and, in spite of the good-natured
remonstrances of the principal and one or two of the others, his enemies
obtained a majority in the common-room; and it was decided that John
Brown was too dangerous a character to be allowed to remain in college
during vacation. But they had not got rid of him yet.

About two miles out of Oxford, on the C---- road, if any one takes the
trouble to turn up a narrow lane, and then follow a footpath by the side
of the canal, he will come to one of the most curious-looking farmhouses
that he (or at least I) ever met with. It is a large rambling
uninhabited-looking place; the house, as is not unusual, forming one
side of a square enclosure, of which the barns and outhouses make up the
rest. The high blank walls of these latter, pierced only here and there
by two or three of the narrowest possible lancet-holes, give it
something the air of a fortification. Indeed, if well garrisoned, it
would be almost as strong a post as the Chateau of Hougoumont; with this
additional advantage, that it has a moat on two sides of it, and a
canal, only divided from it by a narrow towing-path, on a third. The
front (for it has a front, though, upon my first visit, it took me some
time to find it, it being exactly on the opposite side to the approach
at present in use, and requiring two pretty deep ditches to be crossed,
in order to get at it from the direction)--the front only has any
regular windows; and of these, most of the largest are boarded up,
(some, indeed, more substantially closed with brick and mortar) in order
to render it as independent as possible of the glazier and the assessor
o