as it must have looked for two centuries at least, you felt an involuntary
shiver, as of warm, human, daily life brought suddenly into contact
with the pale ghosts of the past. You could not escape the haunting
thought that these oaken tables were dined at, these high-backed chairs
sat upon, these black-framed, dirt-obscured portraits gazed at and
admired by people, once flesh and blood like yourself, who had become
skeletons--nay, mere dust, centuries before you were born. Also, that
other people would be dining, sitting, gazing, and talking in this very
same spot long after you yourself had become a skeleton in your turn.

This impression of the exceeding mutability of all things, common to
most very old houses, was stronger than ordinary in this house, whose
owners did not even hold it by ancestral right, so as to find and leave
behind some few ancestral ties and memories, but came and went, with
all that belonged to them; the only trace of their occupancy and
themselves being a name on the college books, or a solitary portrait on
the college wall. The old dervish's saying to the Eastern king, "Sire,
this is not a place, but a caravanserai," might have been applied here
only too truly. It was not a home, it was the lodge of a college.

Until eighteen months ago, the date of Dr. Grey's appointment, there
had not been a woman's face or a child's foot about it for a hundred and
fifty years. All the masters had been unmarried--grim, gray fellows--
advanced in years. Dr. Arnold Grey, whose fellowship had terminated
early, and who had afterward been tutor and dean, was the youngest
master that had ever been known at Saint Bede's; and his election might
consequently have been unpopular had he not been personally so much
liked, and had there not happened immediately afterward that scandal
about Edwin Uniacke. Therein he acted so promptly and wisely, that
the sleepy, timid old dons as well as the Uniacke family--for the lad