departed to the dining-room, with great strides of his bowed, muscular
legs, and, after some walking backwards and forwards, deposited upon the
drawing-room table a large punchbowl, accompanied by a ten-pound sugar
loaf supported on three students' swords placed crosswise. Meanwhile,
the Baron had been going round among his guests as they sat regarding
the punch-bowl, and addressing them, with a face of immutable gravity,
in the formula: "I beg of you all to drink of this loving-cup in student
fashion, that there may be good-fellowship among the members of our
course. Unbutton your waistcoats, or take them off altogether, as you
please." Already the Dorpat student had divested himself of his tunic
and rolled up his white shirt-sleeves above his elbows, and now,
planting his feet firmly apart, he proceeded to set fire to the rum in
the punch-bowl.

"Gentlemen, put out the candles!" he cried with a sudden shout so loud
and insistent that we seemed all of us to be shouting at once. However,
we still went on silently regarding the punch-bowl and the white shirt
of the Dorpat student, with a feeling that a moment of great solemnity
was approaching.

"Put out the lights, Frost, I tell you!" the Dorpat student shouted
again. Evidently the punch was now sufficiently burnt. Accordingly
every one helped to extinguish the candles, until the room was in total
darkness save for a spot where the white shirts and hands of the three
students supporting the sugarloaf on their crossed swords were lit up by
the lurid flames from the bowl. Yet the Dorpat student's tenor voice
was not the only one to be heard, for in different quarters of the
room resounded chattering and laughter. Many had taken off their tunics
(especially students whose garments were of fine cloth and perfectly
new), and I now did the same, with a consciousness that "IT" was
"beginning." There had been no great festivity as yet, but I felt
assured that things would go splendidly when once we had begun drinking
tumblers of the potion that was now in course of preparation.

At length, the punch was ready, and the Dorpat student, with much
bespattering of the table as he did so, ladled the liquor into tumblers,
and cried: "Now, gentlemen, please!" When we had each of us taken a
sticky tumbler of the stuff into our hands, the Dorpat student and Frost
sang a German song in which the word "Hoch!" kept occurring again and
again, while we joined, in haphazard fashion, in the