admission. One student acquitted himself very lamely, and at
the supper which it was the custom for the candidates to give
to the examiners, when they passed upon their several merits,
Hoffman paused in coming to this one, and turning to Wilkins
said, as if in hesitation, though all the while intending to
admit him, "Martin, I think he knows a _little_ law." "Make it
stronger, Jo," was the reply; "_d----d_ little."]

These social worthies had jolly suppers at the humble taverns of the
city, and wilder revelries in an old country house on the Passaic, which
is celebrated in the "Salmagundi" papers as Cockloft Hall. We are
reminded of the change of manners by a letter of Mr. Paulding, one of
his comrades, written twenty years after, who recalls to mind the keeper
of a porter house, "who whilom wore a long coat, in the pockets whereof
he jingled two bushels of sixpenny pieces, and whose daughter played the
piano to the accompaniment of broiled oysters." There was some
affectation of roystering in all this; but it was a time of social
good-fellowship, and easy freedom of manners in both sexes. At the
dinners there was much sentimental and bacchanalian singing; it was
scarcely good manners not to get a little tipsy; and to be laid under
the table by the compulsory bumper was not to the discredit of a guest.
Irving used to like to repeat an anecdote of one of his early friends,
Henry Ogden, who had been at one of these festive meetings. He told
Irving the next day that in going home he had fallen through a grating
which had been carelessly left open, into a vault beneath. The solitude,
he said, was rather dismal at first, but several other of the guests
fell in, in the course of the evening, and they had on the whole a
pleasant night of it.

These young gentlemen liked to be thought "sad dogs." That they were