hall at half-past ten, and Ward gave me no comfort by saying
that he did not suppose it mattered when we went as long as we turned
up some time. Dons would have to be very different from masters if
that was the case, and as I imagined that they would be of much the
same breed only glorified, I had no wish to begin by making them angry.

There were thirty or forty freshers in the hall when we got there, and
a few dons sitting at the high table at the end of it. Murray and two
or three other men were up talking to them when I arrived, and I
guessed that they were taking the scholars and exhibitioners
alphabetically, and that I was too late for my turn; though Ward, who
was a commoner and fortunate enough to begin with a W, was probably in
heaps of time.

When Murray came down he told me that they had called out my name
several times, which made me, quite unreasonably, feel angry with Ward,
but presently they shouted for me again and I went up.

Though I felt rather agitated as I walked up the hall and saw these
gowned people waiting for me, the idea flitted across my mind that they
looked most extremely like a row of rooks sitting on a long stick. My
prevailing impression as I approached them was one of beak, they seemed
to me like a lot of benevolent and expectant birds. As a matter of
fact this impression was false, and I got it because I was looking at
the Warden--as the Head of St. Cuthbert's was called--and not at the
group of dons on each side of him.

The Warden was a little man whose head had apparently sunk down into
his neck and got a tilt forward in the process. His eyes were grey and
shrewd, the sort of eyes which one watches to see the signs of the
times; his nose, being that of the Warden, I will only call prominent,
and he had a habit of passing his hand over his mouth and chin, which
was merely a habit, but suggested to me at first sight that he was
pleased with his morning shave. He was nearly sixty years old, and
when he wanted to be nice his efforts were not intelligible to
everybody, but there was no mistaking him when he really wished to be
nasty. However, he was one of those men who are spoken of at Oxford as
having European reputations, and possibly the burden of an European
reputation gives the owner of it a right to behave differently from
ordinary people who have no reputation at all, or if they have one
would prefer that it should be forgotten.

The Warden held out a hand to me and