o hold a roll-call
of our diseases at breakfast, to discuss surgical operations at
luncheon, and to provide tales of sea-sickness by way of humour at
dinner. We kept our complaints to ourselves and were in truth more
than a little ashamed of them.

St. Cuthbert's had a reputation of its own. Men in other colleges
criticized us very freely. They said that we were prigs, that the
'Varsity boat would never be any good as long as there was a St.
Cuthbert's man in it, and other pleasant things which did not annoy me,
since I, having been a butt for much personal criticism all my life,
can even get some satisfaction from finding that a crowd of other
people are as bad as I am. Besides, we had nearly one hundred and
fifty men at St. Cuthbert's, and I thought it was absolutely stupid to
say we were all prigs and that none of us could row.

The truth of the matter was, as far as I could judge, that at St.
Cuthbert's there were often a large number of clever men, and clever
men when young can get on one's nerves most terribly. It is all right
for men to be clever when they are old or even middle-aged, then
allowances are made for them and they may be as odd as they please.
But if any one happens to be clever when he is at Oxford, he will have
to watch himself closely or he will be called either a genius or a
lunatic, and the one is almost as fatal as the other.

In a college as large as St. Cuthbert's it was natural that there
should be a number of different sets. We had several men who are best
described by the word "bloods"; two or three of them belonged to the
Bullingdon, a few of them to Vincent's, of which Club most of "the
blues" in the 'Varsity were members, and nearly all had plenty of money
and every one of them lived as if they had plenty. I cannot call them
athletic, though they and the really athletic set were more or less
mixed up together. We had also a very serious set who, I thought, gave
themselves far too many airs. Perhaps serious is not quite the right
word to apply to them, for one of this gang wrote a comic opera and
another wrote a farce; but these were just thrown out in their spare
time, and when I attended a reading of the libretto of the comic opera
I went so fast asleep that I cannot say how comic it was. But if it
had been very funny I should think some one would have laughed loud
enough to wake me up. Generally speaking this set seemed to be bent on
the reformation of England, a thing w