A decree had been issued by the “authorities” of a well-known College (it was in the pre-ritual days) that no undergraduate should present himself at morning chapel service with his scarlet hunting-coat underneath his surplice--a costume neither utterly secular nor completely ecclesiastical, and therefore a motley garb which it did not seem unjust or unreasonable to forbid in a sacred place. However, the order was implicitly obeyed at the ensuing matins, with solemn and suspicious exactitude. Alas! it was “the torrent’s smoothness ere it dash below;” for on the third morning, when the College servants arrived to take down the shutters and to light the fires, they discovered that “a change had come over the spirit of their dream.” Every one of the panelled doors throughout the Quadrangle of the Canons, the very seat of hoar and reverend authority, had been artistically painted during the night with the hue of Nimrod, a glowing hunter’s red! The gates were immediately closed and barred, and every member of the College convened before a grand divan of the Dons, to undergo immediate scrutiny on the origin of that which some of the undergraduates irreverently termed this ultra-observance of the rubric (their wit would be obscure to those who are unaware that _rubrica_, the etymon of our Church rules, signifies ruddy or red). The authors of this outrage escaped detection, although every painter in Oxford was summoned for examination, and all the dealers in colours and oils. It was subsequently whispered among the initiated that the artist, with his brushes and materials, had been brought down from London in a post-chaise-and-four, secretly introduced through an unnoted postern, and when his work was done, hospitably feasted and paid, and then sent back at full speed through the night to town.