It is not to be wondered at, then, if John's kind friends somewhat damaged his reputation among the Dons, and watched their opportunity to annihilate him. It came, and they were down upon him at once. Some half-dozen noisy men, the survivors of a supper-party, had turned into Brown's rooms (he seldom sat up so late) for a parting cigar. Having accomplished this, they took it into their heads to dance a quadrille in the middle of the covered thoroughfare, for the benefit of the echo, to the music of six individual tunes sung in chorus. So strange a performance brought down some of the fellows; the men were not recognised, but traced to Brown's rooms. He refused to give up their names--was declared contumacious; and, in spite of the good-natured remonstrances of the principal and one or two of the others, his enemies obtained a majority in the common-room; and it was decided that John Brown was too dangerous a character to be allowed to remain in college during vacation. But they had not got rid of him yet. About two miles out of Oxford, on the C---- road, if any one takes the trouble to turn up a narrow lane, and then follow a footpath by the side of the canal, he will come to one of the most curious-looking farmhouses that he (or at least I) ever met with. It is a large rambling uninhabited-looking place; the house, as is not unusual, forming one side of a square enclosure, of which the barns and outhouses make up the rest. The high blank walls of these latter, pierced only here and there by two or three of the narrowest possible lancet-holes, give it something the air of a fortification. Indeed, if well garrisoned, it would be almost as strong a post as the Chateau of Hougoumont; with this additional advantage, that it has a moat on two sides of it, and a canal, only divided from it by a narrow towing-path, on a third. The front (for it has a front, though, upon my first visit, it took me some time to find it, it being exactly on the opposite side to the approach at present in use, and requiring two pretty deep ditches to be crossed, in order to get at it from the direction)--the front only has any regular windows; and of these, most of the largest are boarded up, (some, indeed, more substantially closed with brick and mortar) in order to render it as independent as possible of the glazier and the assessor of taxes. There is a little bridge, very much decayed, thrown across the narrow moat to what was, in former days, the main entrance; but now the door was nailed up, the bridge ruinous, and the path leading to it no longer distinguishable in the long rank grass that covered the wet meadows upon which the house looked out. It was a place that filled you involuntarily with melancholy feelings; it breathed of loneliness and desolation, changed times and fallen fortunes. I never beheld it but I thought of Tennyson's "Mariana in the moated Grange"--