If the latest lingering summer tourist in Scotland should perchance delay his departure until he is driven southward by the chill evenings of November, he may chance to see arising around him, in some considerable town, a race of young men, whose loose robes, varying from the brightest of fresh scarlet to the sombrest hue which years of bad usage can bestow on that gay colour, attract him as peculiar and funny, and as, on the whole, a phenomenon provocative of inquiry. He is told that the session has begun, and these are the students of the university. The information will perhaps be surprising to him, whoever he be: if he be an Oxonian or Cantab, a sneer of derision will perhaps curve his lips when he remembers the gentleman commoners, and tufted noblemen, who crowd the streets of his Alma Mater in haughty exclusiveness and unmeasured contempt of the citizen class, who evidently have no respect whatever for the scarlet gown men of poor Scotland. Indeed, the luxurious academic ease, the placid repose of dignified scholarship, are strangers to these wearers of the flowing toga. It is evident that many of them have felt the pinch of poverty. No pliant gyp attends the toilet, or lays forth the table for the jovial “night-cap.” Hard work and hard fare are their portion, and their raiment shows that they have been rubbed roughly against the world, instead of being set apart from its toils and cares and vulgar turmoil in aristocratic isolation. Some of the gowns are bright and new, indeed, and the faces in which they culminate are ruddy, fresh, and warm. Yet the youths endowed in these blushing honours seem not to exult therein, but rather to give place to the hard-featured brethren, whose threadbare togas bear the grim marks of mud and soot, or hang in tatters like a beggar’s cloak. The truth is, that the wear and tear of the gown is held indicative of advancement in the academic curriculum, and is rather encouraged than avoided. And of those who wear it, many, though they may have been sufficiently tutored in the economy of their more serviceable clothing, have not made acquisitions in the school of finery, or acquired a weakness for decorative vanity. We remember an instance of a hard-featured mountaineer, who afterwards rose to distinction in an abstruse department of science, being charged by his fellow-students with having so far desecrated the gown as to have perambulated the streets with a barrow hawking potatoes, by the cry of “Taties—taties!” He admitted the commercial part of the charge, but denied the admixture of potato-vender and student by the desecration of the robes. He was careful to put off his gown while he cried “taties.”