Undergraduate Life at Oxford

Richard Harding Davis

Harpers Monthly/October, 1893

THE Oxford undergraduate impressed me as the most interesting combination of shyness and audacity that I had ever met. His extreme shyness seems to be his chief dissimilarity, not to most Englishmen, but to all other undergraduates. I mistook it at first for hautuer, and a personal disinclination to see more of myself, which, as I had come so many thousand miles to see him, was discouraging in the extreme. But after he had listened to me with marked disapproval for some time he would blush, and ask me to dinner in hall, or mention, as if he were rather ashamed of the fact, that he expected his sisters to tea in his rooms, or that some of the men were coming to breakfast the next morning, and that if I liked I could come too. As he kept this up steadily for the whole of the Eights’ week, I decided that he was the most truly hospitable soul I had met in England; most truly so, as social functions of the most simple order were so evidently a trial to him, and the presence of a stranger a cause of much personal embarrassment and distress. But when it was not an occasion of ceremony, and after he had conquered the shyness which at first lay hold upon him, he developed a most reckless and audacious spirit, and I forgot to study him in trying to keep up with his different moves, and to avoid the traps he laid for me, and, owing to being in his company, the wrath of the townsfolk and the clutches of the local constabulary.

The town of Oxford is at its best during the week in which the eight-oared boats of the twenty colleges belonging to the university row for mastery on the river. It is then filled with people up from London. The weather, which is always to be considered first, is the best the year gives, the green quadrangles and the flowers are more beautiful than at any other time, and every afternoon the river overflows with boats. The beauty of Oxford, as everybody knows, does not lie in any one building or in any one street; it is the abundance and continuing nature of its beauty which makes it what it is. It is not like any other show town in that one does not ride or walk from the inn to see a certain cathedral or a particular monument. In Oxford with every step you take you are encompassed and shut in with what is oldest and best in architecture, with what is softest and most beautiful in turf and in window gardens of flowers. You cannot go to the corner to post a letter without being halted by some iron gateway which you have not seen before, or a row of mocking gargoyles, or a mysterious coat of arms, or a statue half eaten by the cannibals of Time and Weather. You rush through whole streets—being in a hurry to see the boats start, or late for a luncheon, or some such important matter—lined with crumbling walls or marvelous facades, with glimpses through great doorways of radiant gardens, or of oaken halls hung with old paintings and marble tablets. They are as much a matter of course as are the fire-escapes in New York, and so common to the town that you see them as a whole, and regard them as little as you regard the signs on the houses as you rush past them on the elevated. They form part of the very atmosphere, and those who breathe this atmosphere for any length of time grow to consider Oxford as a home, and return to it after many years to find it just as dear to them and just as beautiful and almost as old. I think it is much better to take Oxford this way than to go over it piece by piece with Baedeker in hand to acquaint one’s self with the window of the headless scholar, with the tower that Wolsey built overnight, and the room in which Dr. Johnson wrote something very important, the name of which I forget. Personally, I confess to not knowing the location of more than three of all the twenty colleges. They all seemed to me to run into one another. And then it really did not matter, for you were sure to reach the one for which you had started if you made a sufficient number of wrong turns, and asked your way from every third undergraduate, and disobeyed his directions implicitly. And then the Eights’ week is not a time in which one can best linger before stained-glass windows. For the river calls you by day, and there are suppers at night, and the very much alive undergraduates are as worthy of consideration as those who have gone before, and who remain in memorial tablets or on darkened canvas.

Boating is a much more serious business at Oxford than at Yale or Harvard. At either of these two latter universities a varsity crew and four class crews are as much as the undergraduates furnish, while at Oxford, where there are no greater number of students, each of the twenty colleges places eight good men in its boat every term, and from them supplies a varsity eight as well. And these are only the official representatives of the colleges, for apart from them entirely are the private canoes of many curious makes and many names, besides that noble and worthy institution the Oxford punt. So that every student owns his boat as a matter of course, just as he owns his umbrella, and uses it almost as frequently.

There is a story of a Western Congressman who asked why the American people should complain of the inadequacy of their navy. “All we want is a few more ships,” he said. “We have water enough.” When one sees the Thames at Oxford and its branch the Cherwell, one is inclined to transpose this, and to admit that the undergraduates have boats in sufficiency, and that all they need is a little water. This seems especially true when a punt strikes your boat in the stern and two pair of oars form a barrier above your head, and a confusing chorus of voices assail you on all sides with “Look ahead, sir.” This, however, adds an element of excitement which would be otherwise lacking, and teaches you to be polite as well as to row, or rather to steer, for it can hardly be called rowing when you back water and unship your oars twice to every time you take a pull forward. At Oxford a man is first taught how to unship his oars, and then how to back water. After he can do this quickly, in spite of the fixed rowlocks, which custom still fastens to all save the racing-boats, he is taught the less-used practice of pulling ahead. But the very number of the boats, while not conducive to speed, gives the wonderful life and color to the dark waters and overhanging trees. The girls in their summer frocks, and the men in their brilliant blazers and ribboned caps, and the canoes with colored parasols, make the little river and its little branch a miniature Henley or an English Venice, and at the same time furnish you with an excellent instance of British conservatism. For no matter how musical or noisy the men in your boat may be, or how pretty the women, those in the other boats passing within a yard of you consider you as little as though you were a part of the bank. Their eyes avoid you, and their ears as well. A man could pass between the double rows of punts and canoes tied in the shade to the banks of the Cherwell, singing or shouting or confessing a murder, or making love to the girl in the bow, and no one of the young men along the bank within reach of his oar would raise his head from his novel, or stop pulling the ears of his fox terrier, or cease considering the bowl of his pipe.

The course over which the races are rowed at Oxford is a little less than a mile. The Thames for that mile is about as wide as an eight-oared boat is long, or ever so little wider, and the last half of the course is lined with house-boats, or “barges,” as they call them. Each college has its barge, and each barge is a wonderful thing, colored and carved and gilded and decorated with coats of arms, and with a brilliant flag flapping above it of silk and gold, and as large as a campaign banner. They look like enormous circus bandwagons robbed of their wheels and floated on rafts. The raft part of the barge holds very smart-looking undergraduates in ribboned straw hats and flannels; the barge itself contains a club-room, with racing prints on the walls where there are not windows, a long table for tea, and a dressing-room for the crew. On the top of the barge is a roof garden of pretty girls, each properly chaperoned to the third and fourth degree; and sometimes, when the college to which the barge belongs thinks it is going to bump the boat of another college, there is a regimental band. Opposite the line of barges, which stretches a quarter of a mile along the bank, is the towing-path, and back of it meadows filled with buttercups and daisies. This towing-path is where those who “run with the boats” follow the race, and where the townspeople gather. There are two races on each day of the Eights’ week, one for the the second- best boats at half past four, and one at half past six for the ten first-best boats. So at four o’clock each day the town of Oxford suddenly wakes up, and the people begin to pour out of lodging-houses and quadrangles, and inns and college gardens, and what seems an invading army of young women and their brothers (you can tell they are their brothers because they wear the same ribbons around their hats), march down the High to the river in the middle of the street rather than on the sidewalks, and so increase the similitude to an organized army, and make one wonder how many streets there are at home through which young women in white frocks and young men in pipeclayed cricket shoes could walk so serenely.

Among these you notice many young men in a sort of undress uniform, which is very undress, but quite uniform. These are the men who run with the boats, and who, to an American, form the most novel and picturesque feature of the races. Each wears a blazer, a cap with his college arms worked upon it, a jersey cut V-shape, a muffler around his neck, heavy knickerbocker stockings turned down at the calf, and a pair of running breeches, of a decollete nature, which leave his bare knees and most of his legs as free and unimpeded as a Highlander’s.

There is no deviation in this costume. It is as rigorous as court dress. No man would think of wearing high-neck jersey and discarding the heavy muffler, or of leaving off the heavy stockings and substituting long flannel trousers. Men who have run with the boats have always worn just those things. It is a tradition. You can see them in prints and in the illustrations of Tom Brown at Oxford, and no undergraduate would think of changing it. These men who are going to run continue on up the towpath, the girls mount the different barges, or get into punts or row-boats and block up the river, and the sedate undergraduates distribute themselves about on the raft part of whichever barge is called for by the ribbon on their hats. It is quite impossible not to come back to these ribbons. No one knows until he goes to Oxford how many combinations can be made out of the primary colors; there are almost as many as there are combinations in a pack of cards. Each college has its ribbon, and each college crew, cricket, and football team, and all of its various dining or debating societies, have their individual ribbon, and no two are alike. As there are twenty colleges this calls for many varieties of ribbon. Those men who are on the varsity Elevens or Eights wear a broad dark blue ribbon which gives them the proud title of “a Blue.” You say a man has got his Blue as you say Lord Kosebery has been given the Garter, or you say a man is a Blue just as you say such a one is an M.P. or a V.C., only you say it with more awe. When I first went to Oxford the shopkeeper offered me my choice of three hundred combinations of colors for my hat, and I proposed in my ignorance, and in order to avoid any possible assumption of rnembership, to decorate it with one of plain modest dark blue. If I had asked the yeoman of the guard to deck me out in the regalia in the Tower of London, I could not have been crushed with a more indignant scorn or a more abrupt refusal. One man was pointed out to me at Oxford over half a dozen times as “So-and-so of Pembroke.”’ This was all I was ever told; I was evidently supposed to know the rest; but as I did not, I asked one day, expecting to hear he was a Senior Wrangler, or a Newgate prize, or the Son of Somebody which latter, by-the-way, does not count for much at Oxford; but I was told that he was the only man in the university who had made a serious study of the college ribbons; that this was his life’s work, his particular metier, and I learned to bow with respect to the one man who can distinguish by a glance at five hundred passing-undergraduates those who belong to the Palmerston Club and those who play on the eleven for Magdalen.

A bumping race seems a most inexplicable and rather absurd affair to Americans as they hear of it, but it impresses you, if you see it often enough, as an institution of distinctly sporting qualities. It is a triumph of mind over matter, the matter in this particular being the banks of the Thames, which lie so close together at Oxford that it is not possible for two boats to row abreast for any great distance. To overcome this, the undergraduates of long ago invented the bumping race. Its principle is briefly this: A certain number of boats are placed, one after the other, in a line at equal distances apart; they are then started at the same instant, and the object of each boat is to increase the distance between itself and the boat immediately behind it, and to bump with its bow the stern of the boat immediately in front. There are two races a day for one week, and the boats that are bumped on the first day drop back on the next day, and stand one place lower down in the line—that is, if the fourth boat of the ton which start bumps number three, number three on the next day will drop to fourth place, and number four will proudly move up higher, and try to bump number two.

There is really no regular finish, so far as the spectator is concerned, to a bumping race, because a bump may take place anywhere along the course, and one is just as likely to see the best of the race at one point on the bank as at another. But the barges line the upper end of the river, where all those boats still unbumped stop after they have reached a certain point. The start is made quite out of sight of the barges a mile down the river, at the upper end of one of its sharpest turns.

To see and appreciate a bumping race properly, you should watch the start of one race, the finish of another, and at another time “run with the boats” along the bank. The boats leave the several barges to take up their places at the start in an inverse order to that in which they return—that is, the boat which is to tail the procession coming back will row over the course first, and so avoid the necessity of having another boat crowd past it. As the first eight men start off, the sedate undergraduates stamp their walking-sticks into the flooring, and express their satisfaction at the sight by guttural murmurs of approval of a most well-bred and self-contained nature; and the rival crews, who are drawn up in their boats beside the other barges, lift their oars slightly and rattle them in the rowlocks as a salute. Then the men of the first eight pull off their sweaters and throw them to the undergraduates on the floating raft, and the trainer takes the blade of the stroke’s oar and shoves them out into the stream; and the coxswain, who is always a most noisy and excitable little bully, who abuses and beseeches his crew, and shows not the least gratitude to them for giving him such a pleasant and rapid row, cries “Get away” angrily, and the eight bend nicely together, and on the third stroke are well off, with a special attention to form for the benefit of the spectators on the barges. There is just room for them to turn when they reach the starting-place below the bend, which is in front of hanging willows and broad low meadows and an old inn. On one side lies the towing-path, a narrow dusty road close to the bank, and on the other the green fields. At regular intervals along the towing-path wooden posts mark the station of the ten competing boats, which are kept in place by a waterman, who holds the bow with a boathook, and by the coxswain, who further steadies the boat by holding one end of a cord, the other end of which is fastened to the bank, while he clutches the tiller ropes in his right. There are two signal guns—one five minutes before the start, and the second four minutes later. At the first gun each of the ten boats, lying a hundred feet apart, moves out into the stream, the waterman of each pushing the bow from the bank, the coxswain leaning forward and meeting the tugging of the oars with the backward pressure of the cord; and the time-keepers, of which each boat has one, count aloud the last minute. If it is a still afternoon, you can hear the nearest of them counting together, the men in the boats sitting meanwhile as immovable as figure-heads on a man-of war, and the five or six hundred bare-kneed runners on the towpath, who are waiting to race with their own boat, to encourage or warn her crew as the need may be, standing counting also, but silently and with only their lips moving.

“Thirty seconds gone,” count the timekeepers; “forty seconds gone; fifty seconds gone. Four—three— two—one—row,” and at the last word the ten coxswains shout in unison, the eighty broad backs lunge forward, and the scramble to touch the boat ahead and to keep out of the clutches of the one behind begins, and continues for six feverish minutes. There is one advantage about a bumping race in that the men can see how near they are to being bumped, while they cannot see without turning completely in their seats how near they are to bumping the boat in front. The advantage of this lies in the fact that they are always sure to pull their best when the danger is greatest, and that the coxswain can make them believe they are gaining on the boat in front by simply saying so. To further warn them and to guide the coxswain, who cannot look behind him, three men accompany each boat along the bank with a bell and a revolver and a policeman’s rattle. The sounding of any of these signifies the distance one boat is from the other.

 It is a very different scene at the other end of the course. The green meadows there are crowded with people, and the floating grand stands of barges, each with its flag, like a company of soldiers, stand as in review for the march past. For a time hundreds of little boats move along the bank and block the channel or cling to the rafts of the barges, and the punts of the Thames conservancy scurry from side to side with belated undergraduates and townspeople. And then the river grows very still, and everyone listens. A gun from very far off sends a report lazily across the meadows, and half the people say, “It’s the first,” and the other half that it is the “second,” and while they are discussing this the gun sounds again, and everyone says, “One minute more.” It is quite still now, strangely so to an American accustomed to college yells ringing at an

athletic meeting even before the contestants have left the hotels for the grounds. And he misses the rahrahs and the skyrocket cries and the inquiries as to who’s all right and the songs in which the fame and name of some college hero is being handed down to his four years of immortality. He compares the rival cries of the different observation cars along the New Haven course with this polite and easy patience. It might be a garden party or a sailing race for all the enthusiasm there is in advance. The birds in the meadows chirp leisurely, the calm of a bank holiday in London settles on the crowd, and the river nods and rocks the boats gently as though it meant to put them to sleep, and then from very far off you think you hear a faint clamor of men’s voices, but it dies out so suddenly that before you can say, “They’re off,” you are glad you did not commit yourself, and then it comes again, and now there is no doubt about it. It is like the roar of the mob in a play, unformed and uneven, and growing slowly sharper and fiercer, but still like a roar, and not measured and timed as the cheering is at home. There is something quite stern and creepy about it, this volume of angry sounds breaking in on the quiet of such a sunny afternoon, and then you see the first advance-guard of the army which is making the uproar, and the prow of the first boat with the water showing white in front, and the eight broad backs lunging and bending back and forth and shooting up and down the limit of the sliding-seat as they dart around the turn. You have seen men row before, but it is quite safe to say you have never seen anything like that which is coming towards you along the broad towpath. If you have ever attended an athletic meeting you may possibly have seen as many as twenty men start together in a quarter-mile handicap race with the whole field grouped within six yards of the line, and you may have thought it pretty as they all got off together in a bunch. But imagine, not twenty men within six yards of one another, but hundreds stretching shoulder to shoulder for half a mile along a winding road, all plunging and leaping and pushing and shoving, and shouting with the full strength of their voices, slipping down the bank and springing up again, stopping to shout at some particular man until others, not so particular, push them out of their path, and others tear on and leave them struggling in the rear and falling further and further behind their boat. Five hundred men, each in a different color, blue and bright scarlet, striped or spotted, parsons in high waistcoats and flannel trousers, elderly dons with children at home in knickerbockers, and hundreds of the uniformed barelegged runners shooting their pistols and ringing the bells, and all crying and shouting at once: “Magdalen! Magdalen! Well rowed, Magdalen! Pembroke! you have them, Pembroke! Balliol! well rowed, Balliol!” When the last boat has passed, the others not in the race sweep out over the river and bridge it from bank to bank, and the dusty runners on the towpath throw up their heels and dive into the stream, and cross it with six short strokes, and scramble up on their barge and shake themselves like Newfoundland dogs, causing infinite concern for their safety to their sisters, and stampeding the smartly dressed undergraduates in alarm. And then everyone goes into the barge and takes tea, for, on the whole, but for the turbulent five hundred, a bumping race is conducted with infinite discretion and outward calm.

The Oxford undergraduate lives in an atmosphere of tradition, and his life is encompassed with rules which the American undergraduate would find impossible, but which impress the visitor as both delightful and amusing. It is an amusing rule, for instance, which forbids the undergraduate to smoke after ten o’clock under penalty of a fine, which fine is increased by twopence if the smoking is continued after eleven o’clock. There is something so delightfully inconsequential in making smoking more pernicious at eleven than at ten. And the rule which fines an undergraduate of Balliol and his friends as well if he or they pass the gate after nine. I used to leave that college for no other reason than to hear the man at the gate say, “’You are charged to Mr. –, sir,”’ which meant that one of the undergraduates would have to pay the college one large penny because I chose to go out and come in again at the unnatural hour of ten in the evening. There were also some delightful rules as to when and where the undergraduate must appear in his cap and gown, which latter he wears with a careless contempt that would greatly shock the Seniors of the colleges in the Western States who adopt the hat and gown annually, and announce the fact in the papers. It struck me as a most décolleté garment, and was in most cases very ragged, and worn without much dignity, for it only hung from the shoulders to the waist like a knapsack, or was carried wrapped up in a bundle in one hand.

The day of an Oxford man is somewhat different from that of an American student. He rises at eight, and goes to chapel, and from chapel to breakfast in his own room, where he gets a most substantial breakfast — I never saw such substantial breakfasts anywhere else— or, what is more likely, he breakfasts with someone else in someone else’s rooms. This is a most excellent and hospitable habit, and prevails generally. So far as I could see, no one ever lunched or dined or breakfasted alone. He either was engaged somewhere else or was giving a party of his own. And it frequently happened that after we were all seated our host would remember that he should be lunching with another man, and we would all march over to the other man’s rooms and be received as a matter of course. It was as if they dreaded being left alone with their thoughts. It struck me as a university for the cultivation of hospitality before anything else.

After breakfast the undergraduate “reads” a bit, and then lunches with another man, and reads a little more, and then goes out on the river or to the cricket field until dinner. The weather permits this out-of-door life all the year round, which is a blessing the Oxford man enjoys and which his snow-bound American cousin does not. His dinner is at seven, and if in hall it is a very picturesque meal. The big hall is rich with stained glass and full-length portraits of celebrated men whose names the students never by any possible chance know, and there are wooden carved wainscotings and heavy rafters. There is a platform at one end on which sit the dons, and below at deal tables are the undergraduates in their gowns—worn decorously on both shoulders now, and not swinging from only one—and at one corner by themselves the men who are training for the races. The twilight is so late that the place needs only candles, and there is a great rattle of silver mugs that bear the college arms, and clatter of tongues, and you have your choice of the college ale or the toast and water of which you used to read and at which you probably wondered in Tom Brown at Oxford. The dons are the first to leave, and file out in a solemn procession. If you dine with the dons and sit above your fellow-men you are given the same excellent and solid dinner and wine in place of beer, and your friends of the morning make faces at you for deserting them and because of your higher estate. My first dinner with the dons was somewhat confusing. After a most excellent service somebody rose, and I started with the rest down the steps towards the door, when my host stopped me and said, “You have forgotten to bring your napkin.” What solemn rite this foretold I could not guess. I had enjoyed my dinner, and I wanted to smoke, and why I needed a napkin, unless as a souvenir, I could not see; and I continued wondering as we inarched in some certain order of precedence up and down stone stairways and through gloomy passages to another room in an entirely different part of the college, where wo found another long table spread as carefully as the one in the hall below with many different wines and fruits and sweets. And we all sat down at this table as before, and sipped port and passed things around and talked learnedly, as dons should, for half an hour, when we rose, and I again bade my host good-night, but he again stopped me with a deprecatory smile, and again we formed a procession and marched solemnly through passages and over stone floors to another room, where a third table was spread, with more bottles, coffee, and things to smoke. It struck me that an Oxford don mixes some high living with his high thinking. I did not wait to see if there were any more tables hidden around the building, but I suppose there were.

After dinner the undergraduate reads with his tutor out of college or in his own rooms. He cannot leave the college after a certain early hour, and if he should stay out all night the consequences would be awful. This is, of course, quite as incomprehensible to an American as are the jagged iron spikes and broken glass which top the college walls. It seems a sorry way to treat the sons of gentlemen, and more fitted to the wants of a reformatory. There is one gate at Trinity which is only open for royalty, and which was considered to be insurmountable by even the most venturesome undergraduate, until one youth scaled it successfully, only to be caught out of bounds. The college authorities had no choice in the matter but to send him down, as they call suspending a man in Oxford; but so great was their curiosity and belief in the virtue of the gate that they agreed to limit his term of punishment if he would show them how he scaled it. To this, of course, he naturally agreed, and the undergraduates were edified by the sight of one of their number performing a gymnastic feat of rare daring on the top of the sacred iron gate, while the college dignitaries stood gazing at him in breathless admiration from below. Another undergraduate of another college was caught out of bounds one night by the proctor, but promised a merely nominal punishment if he would disclose by what means he escaped, for the walls surrounding the college were deemed impregnable. He had to choose between taking a heavy sentence and leaving the means of escape still a secret, or sacrificing his companions and shutting off all their further excursions by saving himself. He asked the authorities to allow him three days’ time in which he might decide whether he would or would not tell. This was granted him, with the warning that if he did not tell he would be sent down. At the end of the three days he appeared before the college board and said he had decided to tell them how he had escaped. “You will find my answer,” he said, “in the eighteenth Psalm, twenty-ninth verse,” and then left the room. The dignitaries hurriedly opened a prayer-book, and found the following: “By the help of my God have I leaped over the wall.” The young man was not sent down nor the leak in the wall closed. I fear, from all I could hear, that almost every college prison in Oxford has its secret exit and entrance, known only to the undergraduates. Sometimes it is a coalhole, and sometimes a tree which stretches a friendly branch over the spiked wall, and sometimes a sloping roof and a drop of eight feet to the pavement; but there is always something. No lock was ever invented that could not be picked. The pity is that there should be a lock at all. It is only fair to say of these prisons that they are the loveliest prisons in the world, and that they are only prisons by night. By day the gardens and lawns of the quadrangles, as cultivated and old and beautiful as any in England, are as free, and one wonders how anyone ever studies there. One generally associates study with the green-baize table, a student-lamp, a wet towel, and a locked door. How men can study looking out on turf as soft and glossy as green velvet, with great gray buttresses and towers about it, and with rows above rows of window boxes of flowers set into the gray walls like orchids on a dead tree, and a lawn-tennis match going on in one corner, is more than I can understand. The only obvious answer is that they do not study. I am sure the men I knew did not. But there must be some who do, else from where would come the supply of dons?

Different colleges turn out different classes of men. The reading men, who go in for firsts and scholarships and such distinctions, haunt one college; the fast set, who wear the blue and white ribbon of the Bullingdon Club, go to another; the conservative, smart, and titled men go to a third; the nobodies flock by themselves; and the athletes forgather somewhere else, and so help to make up the personality of the whole university.

If I were asked to pick out the characteristic of the Oxford undergraduate which struck me as being conspicuous as his occasional shyness, I would say it was his love of “ragging,” and that when he is indulging in what he calls a “rag,” at someone else’s expense, he is in his most interesting and picturesque mood.

A rag is a practical joke. It may be a simple rag, and consist of nothing more harmful than mild chaffing, or it may be an ornate and carefully prepared and rehearsed rag, involving numerous accomplices and much ingenuity and daring. It is in the audacity of these latter, and in the earnestness in which they are carried out, that the Oxford undergraduate differs most widely from the undergraduate of America. The Yale or Harvard sophomore does a wild thing occasionally, but he does it, I fear, chiefly to tell about it later, and is rather relieved when it is over. He points with pride to the barber poles in his study, but he does not relish the half-hour’s labor and danger spent in capturing them. The Oxford man, on the contrary, enjoys mischief for mischief’s sake; he will never boast of it later, and he will leave one evil act and turn abruptly to another if it appears to offer more attractive possibilities of entertainment. And he carries off his practical joking or chaffing with a much more easy and audacious air. This, I think, is due to class feeling, which is in the atmosphere in England, and which does not exist with us. The Harvard student may think he is of finer clay than the townspeople and the tradesman and policeman, as he generally is, but he cannot bring them to think so too. That is where his English contemporary has so much the advantage of him. The Oxford townsman feels an inborn and traditional respect for the gentleman; he bows meekly to his eccentricities; he takes his chaff with smiles, and regards the undergraduate’s impertinences as one of the privileges of the upper classes. And the Oxford man knows it, and imposes on him accordingly.

It is rather difficult to give instances of a rag and avoid making the undergraduate appear anything but absurd. One cannot show in writing the earnestness and seriousness with which these practical jokes are conducted, nor the businesslike spirit in which they are carried out. Without this they lose the element of audacity which always saves them from being absurd, and raises them to the plane of other flights of the imagination ably performed. The men I knew seemed to live in an element of mischief. They would keep me talking with flattering interest until the clock struck twelve, when they would leap to their feet and explain that it was now past the hour when anyone could leave the college, and that my only means of exit would have to be either down to the pavement by a rope of sheets, or up through it by means of the coal-hole.

Everything they saw suggested a rag, as everything in the pantomime is material for mischief for the clown in the pantaloon. A mail-coach standing in front of a public-house deserted by its driver furnished them with the means of conveyance into the country, where they abandoned her Majesty’s mail-wagon three miles out of town, with the horse grazing by the hedges. A hand organ suggested their disguising themselves as Italians and playing the organ around Oxford, which they did to the satisfaction of the populace and themselves, their expenses being three pounds and their returns two shillings, one of which was given them by a friend who did not recognize them, and who begged them to move on. One night during Eight’s week a group of men stopped to speak to a friend who was permitted to room outside of the college. It was a very warm, close night in June, and he came to the door dressed only in his bath robe. “I will make you,” one of the men said, “ a sporting proposition. I will bet you five shillings that you won’t run to the corner and back in your bath robe.” He said, that if they would make it ten shillings he would run the distance and leave the bath robe in their hands. They accepted this amendment, and after he had fairly started went inside his house with the bath robe and locked the front door. The impudence of Powers in Charles O’Malley was equaled by one man who said while showing some ladies around the quadrangle of Balliol, “That is the Master’s dining-room, that on the floor above is the Master’s study window, and that,” he added, picking up a stone from the gravel walk and hurling it through the window, “is the Master himself.” On another night during Eight’s week three of them disguised themselves as a proctor and two of his bull-dogs, and captured a visiting friend of mine from America, who had been led into their hands by myself and others in the plot, and then basely deserted. The mock proctor and his men declared the American was Lord Encombe, of Magdalen, and fined him ten shillings for being out of college after hours without his cap and gown. He protested that he had no connection with the university, but they were quite as positive that they knew him very well, and gave him his choice of paying the fine or going instantly to jail, and as he had a very vague idea of British law and the university regulations he gave them the money. This they later returned to him with his card before as many of the college as we could gather together, to his intense disgust. He is now waiting with anxious hospitality for the first Oxford undergraduate who visits America, and promises that that unfortunate individual will not return home before he has been brought before every police justice in New York.

The most conspicuous and most generally known instance of ragging is, of course, the way the undergraduates conduct the exercises during Commemoration week. I confess I looked forward to this with wicked anticipation. I had read of it, and had heard those who had seen it tell of it, and I questioned if it were so bad as it was painted, even though I had seen to what lengths the undergraduate would go. The Sheldonian Theatre is a single, circular building, formed inside like a clinic-room in a hospital, but decorated grandly inside and out, and open to the sunlight by great windows. It is topped by a magnificent dome. In the morning of the day when the degrees were to be bestowed it was filled from the floor up to this dome with young girls and their chaperons in the lightest and brightest and most brilliant of summer frocks. They rose tier upon tier in unbroken circles to the balcony, where they began again, and ranged on up to the very top. It was a very pretty sight, for the sun shone in through the stained windows in broad, generous rays, and the lesser authorities of the university, who acted as ushers, wore their red silk hoods and gowns, and moved in and out among the women, looking very learned and fine as the sun touched their white hair and their long mantles of rustling silk. Standing on the floor in the circle formed by the lower balcony were the visitors and the college dons in black robes, or in the blue serge of every day. There were no seats for them, and so they moved about like bears in a bear-pit, gazing up at their friends, and pointing out the celebrities, and talking familiarly of the great men who were about to be honored. A great organ on one side rumbled out soft and not too difficult music (at home we would have spoiled it with a brass band) and helped to make the whole scene impressive and dignified and beautiful. But as I had come to hear the undergraduates misbehave, I was disappointed, and so expressed myself. The man who had brought me pointed to the balcony, and showed where different groups of students were sitting together, looking very good and keeping very quiet among severe matrons and fresh, sweet-looking girls. I recognized several of my friends among the students. They appeared gloomy and resigned. Someone explained this by saying that the women had been crowded into the balcony to scatter the groups of undergraduates and to shame them into silence. 1 was exceedingly disappointed. There were three young men leaning over the balcony facing the organist, a Mr. Lopes. He was playing something of Chopin’s gently, as though he did not want to interfere with the talk, and the dons and the girls in the circles were whispering, as though they did not want to interrupt the music. It was a pretty, well-bred scene, a mixture of academic dignity with a touch of the smartness of the town. And so we waited politely for the procession of dignitaries to appear. And as we waited, whispering, there came suddenly on the hushed warm summer air a boy’s voice, not rudely or “freshly,”’ but with the quiet, authoritative drawl of an English gentleman.

“Mr. Lopes,” said the voice, and the whispering ceased with a start, and the organist’s fingers hesitated on the keys. “Mr. Lopes, I do not care much for Chopin myself. Can you play “Ta-ra-ra boom de-ay”?

From the other side of the gallery a young man sprang excitedly to his feet. “Oh no, sir, don’t play that!” he cried, eagerly. “Play the ‘Old Kent Road.’ I can sing that.”

“I’ve heard him sing it,” a third voice joined in, anxiously, “and I hope, sir, you will play almost anything else.”

That was the beginning. From that on for one hour the building was absolutely at the mercy of the undergraduates. Then one of the three men who were leaning over the balcony, and as plainly in view as actors on a stage, proposed three cheers for the ladies. The response to this showed that though the undergraduates were broken up into small bodies they were as one grand unit in their desire to take a prominent part in the exercises.

“And let me ask,” added the young man who had proposed the cheers, politely, “that you give one more for the two young ladies in pink just coming in, and who, though rather late, are, nevertheless, very welcome.”

This speech, which was accompanied with a polite bow, and followed by enthusiastic cheers, turned the two young ladies into the color of their frocks, and drove them back terrified into the quadrangle. The men who made all the trouble did not attempt to hide in the crowd about them, or to address the public anonymously. They were, on the contrary, far from shrinking from view, and apparently just as far from imagining that anyone would consider they were the least forward. Their manner was serious, and rather that of a public censor who was more bored than otherwise by his duties, but who was determined that the proceedings should go off with dignity.

“Come, sir,” they would say, very shortly, “you really must attend to your duties. You have been conversing with the lady in the blue bonnet for the last five minutes, and several ladies are waiting to be shown their places.”

They did not laugh at their own impertinences, or in any way act as if they thought they were doing anything amusing or peculiar. It was the earnestness of their manner and their mock anxiety that all should go right which made it funny. And the most absurd thing about it was the obvious awe and terror in which the authorities stood of them. But the audience of severe matrons and learned dons and timid, shy girls gazed stolidly before them, and took the most audacious piece of insolence in that same unmoved calm with which they listened to the Greek oration.

The Vice-Chancellor entered at the head of a grand procession of beadles with gold maces, followed by those who were to receive degrees, and plunged with a very red face and nervous manner into his Latin address, through which he raced breathlessly, with his nose glued to the page and his ears deaf to interruptions. They began by telling him, “Don’t be shy, sir,” and “Speak louder, sir”; and then one man suggested doubtfully that it was “rather too good to be original”; and another said, warningly, “You had better be careful, sir; you cribbed that line.” Another laughed indulgently, and said, in a confidential tone of encouragement; “Don’t mind them, sir. I’ll listen to you”; and another, after a pause, exclaimed, with a little sigh of satisfaction, “Now, you know, I call it rather good.” The unfortunate Vice-Chancellor blushed redder than before at this, and in turning over a page hesitated at the word “ut.” “Ut,” he repeated. In an instant twenty men had thrown themselves anxiously across the balcony. “Be careful, sir,” they cried, in agony, “be careful. Do not forget the subjunctive.” “Ah,” they added, with a sigh of relief, “he knew; he knew;” and to this a sceptic added, gloomily: “I don’t believe he knew. Someone must have prompted him.” Then another voice said, reprovingly, “I trust, sir, you do not intend to take up our time much longer,” and the Vice-Chancellor dropped back into his throne, and with the perspiration rolling down his face, folded his robes about him and smiled delightedly at every other attack.

I suppose no such scene is reproduced in any other country. It is almost impossible to believe that such a situation exists out of one of Mr. Gilbert’s operas. The head of the greatest university of the world, surrounded by all the men of it and other universities, and those men highest in art or literature or statesmanship, and each of them in turn at the mercy of a hundred boys not yet of age, literally trembling before them, and finding the honor to which they have looked forward turned into a penance and a nightmare. One undergraduate explained it partly by saying that there were some men who came to Oxford to receive degrees who thought they were conferring rather than receiving honor, and it is for their especial benefit that the ragging is intended. “It puts them in their place,” as one boy said, gravely. “They may be big men up in London, but it is just as well they should know we don’t think so much of them here.” The big men who received degrees on the day I was present were treated rather mildly. All but a very fat professor from Dublin University, who was hailed as “the best Dublin Stout,” and an Indian Prince who appeared in cloth of gold and covered with stars and orders. He had a somewhat dusky countenance, and one of the voices asked, anxiously, “Now, sir, have you used Pears’ soap?” which called forth a chorus of “Shame!” and the foreign prince was loudly cheered to make up for the only remark of the morning which struck one as being ungentlemanly.