They were totally dissimilar, and far asunder in position; but an affair on the slope of the Matterhorn, when the boy had saved the elder man's life, had riveted attachment between them, and bridged over the difference of their academical rank. The Commencement came and went, with its speeches, and its H.R.H. Chancellor, and its pretty women gliding among the elms of Neville's Court (poor Leslie Ellis's daily haunt), filling the grim benches of the Senate House, and flitting past the carved benches of King's Chapel. Granta was henceforth a desert to all Cambridge belles; they could walk down Trumpington Street without meeting a score of little straw hats, and Trumpington Street became as odious as Sahara; the "darling Backs" were free to them, and, of course, they who, by all relations, from those of Genesis to those of Vanity Fair, have never cared, save for _fruit défendu_, saw nothing to admire in the trees, and grass, and river, minus outriggers and collegians. There was a general exodus: Masters' red hoods, Fellows Commoners' gold-lace, Fellows' gown and mortar boards, morning chapel surplices, and under-grads' straw-hats and cutaway coats, all vanished from court and library, street and cloister. Cambridge was empty; the married Dons and their families went off to country-houses or Rhine steamers; Fellows went touring with views to mediæval architecture, Roman remains, Greek inscriptions, Paris laisser aller, or Norwegian fishing, according to their tastes and habits; under-grads scattered themselves over the face of the globe, and were to be found in knots of two or three calling for stout in Véfour's, kicking up a row with Austrian gendarmerie, chalking up effigies of Bomba on Italian walls, striding up every mountain from Skiddaw to the Pic du Midi, burrowing like rabbits in a warren for reading purposes on Dartmoor, kissing sunny-haired Gretchens in German hostelries, swinging through the Vaterland with knapsacks and sticks, doing a walking tour--in fact, swarming everywhere with their impossible French and hearty voices, and lithe English muscle, Granta marked on them as distinctly as an M.B. waistcoat marks an Anglican, or utter ignorance of modern politics a "great classic." Cambridge had emptied itself of the scores of naughty boys that lie in the arms of Mater, and on Tuesday Keane and Sydie were shaking and rattling over those dreadful nervous Eastern Counties tenders, through that picturesque and beautiful country that does permutations with such laudable perseverance on pollards, fens, and flats--flats, fens, and pollards--at the snail's pace that, according to the E.G.R., we must believe to be "express."