The warm bed, it is repeated, was very tempting; but after a few minutes' hesitation, and just as that fatal drowsiness was coming on, Luke Ross rose, tried to repress a shiver, failed, and began to dress hastily by such light as came over the open partition from the corridor, where the four gas-jets sang and sputtered and sent a blue glare into the twenty-four dormitories--very prisonlike, with their sham stone walls, narrow barred windows, and iron bedsteads--that this corridor contained. For some minutes the hissing of the gas was the only sound heard, till the trickle of water into Luke Ross's basin, and sundry pantings, sighs, and splashings, seemed to arouse others to their fate, when there was a thud as of some one leaping out of bed, a loud yawn prolonged into a shivering shudder, and an exclamation of "Oh, that blessed bell!" A more thorough scene of discomfort than Saint Chrysostom's on a dark winters morning--one of those mornings that might be midnight--it would be impossible to conceive, and the students seemed to feel it, and try to vent their feelings upon their fellows. "Here, I say!" said a voice, "I know these beds are damp. I've got my hands covered with chilblains." "Get out!" cried another--conversation being easy, from the fact that every dormitory opened for a space of a couple of feet above its door on to the passage. "Damp don't give chilblains. Oh, I say, how miserable it is to have to shave with cold water in the dark!" "Serve you right for having a beard!" cried another. "Which you'd give your ears to own. Oh, hang it! now I've cut myself. Here, who's got a silk hat? Pull us out a scrap of down, there's a good fellow." "Wipe it dry, and stick a bit of writing-paper against it." "Will that stop it?" "Yes." "Mind and get your hair parted right, lads. Examination day!" "I'll give any fellow a penny to clean my boots." "Why don't you let Tycho clean 'em?" "Hot water, gentlemen! hot water! Any gentleman who wants his boots cleaned please to set them outside the door." "There, get out. It won't do, Tommy Smithers. I'd swear to that squeak of yours from a thousand." "If you come that trick again, Tommy, we'll make you clean every pair of boots in the corridor," shouted a fresh speaker, for by degrees the yawning, and creaking of iron beds and thuds of bare feet upon bare floors had grown frequent, with shuffling noises, and gurgling, and splashing, the chinking of ewers against basins, the swishing of tooth-brushes, and the stamping of chilblained feet being thrust into hard, stout boots, and all done in a hurried, bustling manner, as if those who dressed were striving by rapid movement to get some warmth into their chilly frames. Luke Ross was one of the first dressed: a well-built, dark-eyed, keen-looking young man of five-and-twenty, with a good deal of decision about his well-shaped mouth.