Much absence, tardes and egresses,
  The college-evil on him seizes.
    Trumbull’s Progress of Dullness, Part I.

EIGHT.  On the scale of merit, at Harvard College, eight is the highest mark which a student can receive for a recitation.  Students speak of “getting an eight,” which is equivalent to saying, that they have made a perfect recitation.

  But since the Fates will not grant all eights,
    Save to some disgusting fellow
  Who’ll fish and dig, I care not a fig,
    We’ll be hard boys and mellow.
    MS. Poem, W.F.  Allen.

  Numberless the eights he showers
    Full on my devoted head.—­MS. Ibid.

At the same college, when there were three exhibitions in the year, it was customary for the first eight scholars in the Junior Class to have “parts” at the first exhibition, the second eight at the second exhibition, and the third eight at the third exhibition.  Eight Seniors performed with them at each of these three exhibitions, but they were taken promiscuously from the first twenty-four in their class.  Although there are now but two exhibitions in the year, twelve performing from each of the two upper classes, yet the students still retain the old phraseology, and you will often hear the question, “Is he in the first or second eight?”

  The bell for morning prayers had long been sounding! 
    She says, “What makes you look so very pale?”—­
  “I’ve had a dream.”—­“Spring to ’t, or you’ll be late!”—­
  “Don’t care!  ’T was worth a part among the Second Eight.”
    Childe Harvard, p. 121.

ELECTIONEERING.  In many colleges in the United States, where there are rival societies, it is customary, on the admission of a student to college, for the partisans of the different societies to wait upon him, and endeavor to secure him as a member.  An account of this Society Electioneering, as it is called, is given in Sketches of Yale College, at page 162.

Society electioneering has mostly gone by.—­Williams Quarterly, Vol.  II. p. 285.

ELEGANT EXTRACTS.  At the University of Cambridge, Eng., a cant title applied to some fifteen or twenty men who have just succeeded in passing their final examination, and who are bracketed together, at the foot of the Polloi list.—­Bristed’s Five Years in an Eng.  Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 250.

EMERITUS, pl. EMERITI.  Latin; literally, obtained by service.  One who has been honorably discharged from public service, as, in colleges and universities, a Professor Emeritus.

EMIGRANT.  In the English universities, one who migrates, or removes from one college to another.

At Christ’s, for three years successively,... the first man was an emigrant from John’s.—­Bristed’s Five Years in an Eng.  Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 100.