maudlin ballad about "_Tib and young Colin, one fine day, beneath
the haycock shade-a_," &c., &c., and cursing to find his fire
gone out, and all in darkness. Liquor was ever his master, and to-
day the King's health had been a fair excuse. He did not spy me, but
the roar of his ballad had startled the two men outside, and so,
while he was stumbling over chairs, and groping for a tinder-box, I
slipp'd out in the darkness, and downstairs into the street.




CHAPTER II.

THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CLOAK OF AMBER SATIN,

Guess, any of you, if these events disturbed my rest that night.
'Twas four o'clock before I dropp'd asleep in my bed in Trinity, and
my last thoughts were still busy with the words I had heard. Nor, on
the morrow, did it fair any better with me: so that, at rhetoric
lecture, our president--Dr. Ralph Kettle--took me by the ears before
the whole class. He was the fiercer upon me as being older than the
gross of my fellow-scholars, and (as he thought) the more restless
under discipline. "A tutor'd adolescence," he would say, "is a fair
grace before meat," and had his hourglass enlarged to point the
moral for us. But even a rhetoric lecture must have an end, and so,
tossing my gown to the porter, I set off at last for Magdalen Bridge,
where the new barricado was building, along the Physic Garden, in
front of East Gate.

The day was dull and low'ring, though my wits were too busy to heed