separated by a narrow lane, is certain to catch fire. These old places are terribly inflammable. Some of the dons therefore get upon the roof, Crockford of Caius most active among them, and direct the hose of the engines; not unfrequently in their haste and inexperience deluging themselves and each other with water, to the amusement of the undergraduates below. No attempt is now made to extinguish the fire in the part it has already seized upon, every effort being directed to prevent it from spreading. Several times the flames break into the adjoining rooms, but the dons with the hose, on ladders at the windows, stand their ground and beat them back. All this time the college servants are moving about with cans of beer among the men at work; the butteries of the colleges near are thrown open, and refreshments served to all comers. At last the efforts to check the flames are successful, and they spread no farther. Another hour passes, and it is evident that all danger is over. The flames only shoot up at intervals from the shell they have destroyed. The gown then leave it to the firemen to pump upon the ruins, and scatter to their homes to breakfast. By the time that Frank Maynard had changed his things and was ready, a friend who had been working next to him at the engine, and who had agreed to come in to breakfast, arrived. Arthur Prescott was a man with a short, thick-set figure, and a kindly face with a quaint, old-fashioned expression—one of those faces which, on a boy’s shoulders, looks like that of an old man, but which never alters, and in old age looks younger than it had ever done before. Arthur Prescott—he had been always called Old Prescott at school, and his intimate friends never spoke of him as anything else even now—was a general favourite. No one was ever heard to say a bad word of him. He was one of those men in whom all around him seem instinctively to confide, and to make a depositary of secrets which they would never relate to anyone else; a straightforward, sensible, true-hearted English gentleman. Prescott and Maynard had been great friends when boys together at Westminster; and, indeed, it was principally the fact of the former’s coming to Caius which had induced Frank to choose that college in preference to any other. Maynard greeted his arrival with, “That’s right, Prescott, you’re just in time to help me; there is the gridiron, put the steak on while I see about the coffee.” For some time there was little conversation. Prescott was fully occupied with his culinary charge, and Maynard in the preparation of the coffee; the apparatus being one of those beautifully-scientific inventions, which, while they produce no doubt an excellent result, demand incessant attention, and are liable, in the event of the least thing going wrong, to explode with disastrous consequences. At last all was ready, and they sat down to breakfast. They had scarcely begun when a new-comer entered.