“Your success in the Senate House” said a well-known tutor “depends much on the care you take of the three-mile stone out of Cambridge. If you go every day and see no one has taken it away, and go quite round it to watch lest any one has damaged its farthest side, you will be best able to read steadily all the time you are at Cambridge. If you neglect it, woe betide your degree. Exercise, constant, and regular, and ample, is absolutely essential to a reading man’s success.” And the reading men have taken the lesson to heart. No roads until the era of bicycles were better tramped than the flat Cambridge roads which lend themselves so well to this form of recreation; pair after pair of men, tall and small, a big and a little together, used to keep themselves informed as to their state of repair, or lose the sense of space and time in discussions on the modern substitute for “quiddity” and _essentia_, or the social and biological problems which are newer even than these. Once back in his college the persons on whom the undergraduate’s comfort most depends are the college cook the bedmaker and the “gyp.” The last calls him, brushes his clothes, prepares his breakfast, caters for him, serves his luncheon, waits on him and his friends, and carries back and forth the little twisted paper missives which, as an American noticed fifty years ago, Cambridge undergraduates are perpetually exchanging. All these services the gyp may have to perform for a number of other men. The only woman servant is the “bedmaker” whose name sufficiently describes her official business, but who for the great majority of modern students discharges the functions of gyp. The college kitchen is a busy centre. Here is prepared not only the hall dinner but all private breakfasts and luncheons served in college rooms; and most of the college kitchens supply luncheons and dinners to residents in the town if required. Dinner in hall costs from one shilling and tenpence to two shillings and a penny, according to the college; bread and butter called “commons” can be had from the buttery for 6d. a day; a breakfast dish at a cost of from 6d. to 1/; and at some college halls a luncheon is served at a small fixed charge.[368]