Your Division room is steaming with foul heat, and there is a strong
smell of burnt feathers and oil. A jaunty tutor with pug nose and
consequential air steps into the room--while you all rise to show him
deference--and takes his place at the pulpit-like desk. Then come the
formal loosing of his camlet cloak-clasp,--the opening of his sweaty
Xenophon to where the day's _parasangs_ begin,--the unsliding of his
silver pencil-case,--the keen, sour look around the benches, and the
cool pinch of his thumb and forefinger into the fearful box of names!
How you listen for each as it is uttered,--running down the page in
advance,--rejoicing when some hard passage comes to a stout man in the
corner; and what a sigh of relief--on mornings after you have been out
late at night--when the last paragraph is reached, the ballot drawn,
and--you, safe!
You speculate dreamily upon the faces around you. You wonder what sort
of schooling they may have had, and what sort of homes. You think one
man has got an extraordinary name, and another a still more
extraordinary nose. The glib, easy way of one student, and his perfect
_sang-froid_, completely charm you: you set him down in your own mind
as a kind of Crichton.
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