present Arts or Centre Building, had been erected
and opened. The College had at last an actual home. But the days of its
travail and its worry, its poverty and its depression, its fight for
life itself, had not yet passed.

CHAPTER VI

THE COLLEGE IN THE FIRST MCGILL BUILDINGS

The original College buildings were opened for the reception and
instruction of students on September 6th, 1843. Only twenty regular
students were in attendance during the first session, seventeen of whom
took the Classical course and three the Mathematical course. Steps were
at once taken to provide an adequate collegiate education as called for
in the founder's will, and to organise the teaching and administration
on as extensive and sound a basis as the available funds would permit. A
few books and some scanty school equipment were received from the Normal
School recently closed. The fees of students were fixed at L5 a year, of
which L1 13s. 4d. was assigned to the Senior Professor as his portion,
6s. 8d. to the Bursar, and the remaining L3 to the "House Fund." In
addition, each student paid to the Registrar who was also Secretary and
Bursar, a matriculation fee of 10 shillings which that official was
allowed to keep for his own use. The fees were reduced a few months
later to L3, of which the House Fund received L2 13s. 4d., and the
Bursar 6s. 8d. Students under fourteen years of age and over eighteen
were not allowed to matriculate into the ordinary classes except in very
exceptional cases. The matriculation examination was at first mainly in
Latin and Greek Grammar and the 1st Book of Caesar's Commentaries.
Students who failed to pass this examination were allowed to enter the
College and were formed into a separate class. They paid an additional
entrance fee of 10 shillings and an annual fee of L2, for which they
were not to expect the attention given to other students. Students over
eighteen were permitted to enter as "Fellow Commoners," and were allowed
the special privilege of dining at "the high table." They paid a double
matriculation fee, and their ordinary fee was twenty-five per cent
higher than that of other students. For a brief time only there was a
common dining-room, but because of financial storm and stress and the
necessity for additional room this was in the end abandoned and the
students boarded with the professors who had rooms in the College.
Indeed, the willingness to accept students as boarders seems, in som