eps all shapeless and hollowed by
the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life
has flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left
these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned, pedantic
scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age,
how full and strong had been that tide of young English life. And what
was left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those fiery energies,
save here and there in some old-world churchyard a few scratches upon a
stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin? Yet
here were the silent stair and the grey old wall, with bend and saltire
and many another heraldic device still to be read upon its surface,
like grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had passed.

In the month of May, in the year 1884, three young men occupied the
sets of rooms which opened on to the separate landings of the old
stair. Each set consisted simply of a sitting-room and of a bedroom,
while the two corresponding rooms upon the ground-floor were used, the
one as a coal-cellar, and the other as the living-room of the servant,
or gyp, Thomas Styles, whose duty it was to wait upon the three men
above him. To right and to left was a line of lecture-rooms and of
offices, so that the dwellers in the old turret enjoyed a certain
seclusion, which made the chambers popular among the more studious
undergraduates. Such were the three who occupied them now--Abercrombie
Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him, and William Monkhouse Lee
upon the lowest storey.

It was ten o'clock on a bright spring night, and Abercrombie Smith lay
back in his arm-chair, his feet upon the fender, and his briar-root
pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his ease,
there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old school friend
Jephro Hastie. Both men were in flannels, for they had spent their
evening upon the river, but apart from their dress no one could look at
their hard-cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open-air
men--men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly
and robust. Hastie, indeed, was stroke of his college boat, and Smith
was an even better oar, but a coming examination had already cast its
shadow over him and held him to his work, save for the few hours a week
which health demanded. A litter of medical books upon the table, with
scattered bones, models and anat