summer morning, and the bells waken Stoke, who is sleeping on a flock
bed, in his little camera. His room, though he is not one of the
luxurious clerks whom the University scolds in various statutes, is
pretty well furnished. His bed alone is worth not less than
fifteenpence; he has a "cofer" valued at twopence (we have plenty of
those old valuations), and in his cofer are his black coat, which no
one would think dear at fourpence, his tunic, cheap at tenpence, "a
roll of the seven Psalms," and twelve books only "at his beddes
heed." Stoke has not


"Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and reed,
Of Aristotil and of his philosophie,"


like Chaucer's Undergraduate, who must have been a bibliophile.
There are not many records of "as many as twenty bookes" in the old
valuations. The great ornament of the room is a neat trophy of
buckler, bow, arrows, and two daggers, all hanging conveniently on
the wall. Stoke opens his eyes, yawns, looks round for his clothes,
and sees, with no surprise, that his laundress has not sent home his
clean linen. No; Christina, of the parish of St. Martin, who used to
be Stoke's lotrix, has been detected at last. "Under pretence of
washing for scholars, multa mala perpetrata fuerunt," she has
committed all manner of crimes, and is now in the Spinning House,
carcerata fuit. Stoke wastes a malediction on the laundress, and,
dressing as well as he may, runs down to Parson's Pleasure, I hope,
and has a swim, for I find no tub in his room, or, indeed, in the
camera of any other scholar. It is now time to go, not to chapel--
for Catte's has no chapel--but to parish Church, and Stoke goes very