cold and infinitesimal drops of aconite for John Short’s
headaches, until she observed that John never had
a headache unless he had worked too much, and Angleside
always had a cold when he did not want to work at
all. Especially in the department of the commissariat
she showed great activity, and the reputation the vicar
had acquired for feeding his pupils well had perhaps
more to do with his success than he imagined.
She was never tired of repeating that Englishmen needed
plenty of good food, and she had no principles which
she did not practise. She even thought it right
to lecture young Angleside upon his idleness at stated
intervals. He always replied with great gentleness
that he was awfully stupid, you know, and Mr.
Ambrose
was awfully good about it and he hoped he should not
be pulled when he went up. And strange to relate
he actually passed his examination and matriculated,
to his own immense astonishment and to the no small
honour and glory of the Reverend Augustin Ambrose,
vicar of Billingsfield, Essex. But when that
great day arrived certain events occurred which are
worthy to be chronicled and remembered.
In the warm June weather young Angleside went up to
pass his examination for entrance at Trinity.
There is nothing particularly interesting or worthy
of note in that simple process, though at that time
the custom of imposing an examination had only been
recently imported from Oxford. For one whole
day forty or fifty young fellows from all parts of
the country sat at the long dining-tables in the beautiful
old hall and wrote as busily as they could, answering
the printed questions before them, and eyeing each
other curiously from time to time. The weather
was warm and sultry, the trees were all in full leaf
and Cambridge was deserted. Only a few hard-reading
men, who stayed up during the Long, wandered out with
books at the backs of the colleges or strayed slowly
through the empty courts, objects of considerable
interest to the youths who had come up for the entrance
examination—chiefly pale men in rather shabby
clothes with old gowns and battered caps, and a general
appearance of being the worse for wear.
Angleside had been in Cambridge before and consequently
lost no time in returning to Billingsfield when the
examination was over. Short was to spend the
summer at the vicarage, reading hard until the term
began, when he was to go up and compete for a minor
scholarship; Angleside was to wait until he heard
whether he had passed, and was then going abroad to
meet his father and to rest from the extreme exertion
of mastering the “Apology” and the first
books of the “Memorabilia.” John drove
over to meet the Honourable Cornelius, who was in
a terrible state of anxiety and left him no peace
on the way asking him again and again to repeat the
answers to the questions which had been proposed, reckoning
up the ones he had answered wrong and the ones he
