He was an enthusiast, and therefore happy, whom I have seen in the Humanity class-room on an examination day, his pen racing with time, himself seated in the contents of an ink bottle. Some stories of exams. have even a blacker ending. I write in tears of him who, estimating his memory as a leaky vessel, did with care and forethought draw up a crib that was more condensed than a pocket cyclopædia, a very Liebig's essence of the classics, tinned meat for students in the eleventh hour. Bridegrooms have been known to forget the ring; this student forgot his crib. In the middle of the examination came a nervous knocking at the door. A lady wanted to see the professor at once. The student looked up, to see his mother handing the professor his crib. Her son had forgotten it; she was sure that it was important, so she had brought it herself. Jump the body of this poor victim. There was no M.A. for him that year; but in our gowns and sashes we could not mourn for a might-have-been. Soldiers talk of the Victoria cross, statesmen of the Cabinet, ladies of a pearl set in diamonds. These are pretty baubles, but who has thrilled as the student that with bumping heart strolls into Middlemass' to order his graduate's gown? He hires it--five shillings--but the photograph to follow makes it as good as his for life. Look at him, young ladies, as he struts to the Synod Hall to have M.A. tacked to his name. Dogs do not dare bark at him. His gait is springy; in Princes Street he is as one who walks upstairs. Gone to me are those student days forever, but I can still put a photograph before me of a ghost in gown and cape, the hair straggling under the cap as tobacco may straggle over the side of a tin when there is difficulty in squeezing down the lid. How well the little black jacket looks, how vividly the wearer remembers putting it on. He should have worn a dress-coat, but he had none. The little jacket resembled one with the tails off, and, as he artfully donned his gown, he backed against the wall so that no one might know. To turn up the light on old college days is not always the signal for the dance. You are back in the dusty little lodging, with its battered sofa, its slippery tablecloth, the prim array of books, the picture of the death of Nelson, the peeling walls, the broken clock; you are again in the quadrangle with him who has been dead this many a year. There are tragedies in a college course. Dr. Walter Smith has told in a poem mentioned elsewhere of the brilliant scholar who forgot his dominie; some, alas! forget their mother. There are men--I know it--who go mad from loneliness; and medallists ere now have crept home to die. The capping-day was the end of our springtide, and for some of us the summer was to be brief. Sir Alexander, gone into the night since then, flung "I mekemae" at us as we trooped past him, all in bud, some small flower to blossom in time, let us hope, here and there. MR. JOSEPH THOMSON. IX. MR. JOSEPH THOMSON.