Not dissimilar correctives may be employed, in extreme need, against those mightiest in authority. A favorite device is to screw the oak of an objectionable don. Mr. Andrew Lang, himself formerly a don at Merton, reports a conversation--can it have been a personal experience?--between a don standing inside a newly screwed oak and his scout, who was tendering sympathy from the staircase. "What _am_ I to do?" cried the don. "Mr. Muff, sir," suggested the scout, "when 'e's screwed up, sir, _'e_ sends for the blacksmith." At Christ Church, "The House," as it is familiarly called, much more direct and personal methods have been employed. Not many years ago a censor (whose office is that of the dean at other colleges) stirred up unusual ill-will among his wards. They pulled him from his bed, dragged him into Tom Quad,--Wolsey's Quad,--and threw him bodily among the venerable carp of the Mercury Pond. Then they gathered about in a circle, and, when he raised his head above the surface, thrust him under with their walking-sticks. Something like forty of them were sent down for this, and the censor went traveling for his health. The memory of this episode was still green when the Duke of Marlborough gave a coming of age ball at Blenheim Palace, and invited over literally hundreds of his Oxford friends. In other colleges the undergraduates were permitted to leave Oxford for the night, but at the House the censor stipulated that they be within the gates, as usual, by midnight. This would have meant a break-neck drive of eight miles after about fifteen minutes at the ball, and was far more exasperating to the young Britons than a straightforward refusal. That evening the dons sported their oaks, and carefully bolted themselves within. The night passed in so deep a silence that, for all they knew, the ghost of Wolsey might have been stalking in his cherished quadrangle, the glory of building which the Eighth Henry so unfeelingly appropriated. As morning dawned, the common-room gossips will tell you, the dons crawled furtively out of bed, and shot their bolts to find whether they had need of the blacksmith. Not a screw had been driven. The morning showed why. On the stately walls of Tom Quad was painted "Damn the Dons!" and again in capital letters, "Damn the Dons!" and a third time, in larger capitals, "Damn the Dons!" There were other inscriptions, less fit to relate; and stretching along one whole side of the quad, in huge characters, the finely antithetical sentence: "God bless the Duke of Marlborough." The doors of the dean's residence were smeared with red paint; and against a marble statue of the late Dean Liddell, the Greek lexicographer, a bottle of green ink had been smashed. Two hundred workmen, summoned from a neighboring building, labored two days with rice-root brushes and fuller's earth, but with so little effect that certain of the stones had to be replaced in the walls, and endless scrubbings failed to overcome the