But, strangely enough, I did not feel drawn to Merivale, because it so happened that I had seen the Doctor during the previous spring, when he came to London to buy prizes and attend one or two of the May meetings, which were his solitary annual relaxation. In fact, he had asked me to dine with him at his hotel, “The Bishop’s Keys,” not far from Exeter Hall, and I had gone, and found the Doctor changed. I couldn’t tell how he had changed exactly, for he was still the same man, of course, and still took the same majestic view of life; but somehow he had shrunk, and seeing him at “The Bishop’s Keys” was quite different from seeing him in his study at Merivale, surrounded by all the implements of the scholastic profession. His voice was the same, and his rich vocabulary, and his way of examining a question in all its bearings; but still, he had shrunk, and, a good deal to my surprise and uneasiness, I found myself actually disagreeing with him! He did not thoroughly realise what I had become; but that was my own fault to some extent, because the old fascination under the Doctor’s spell had not entirely perished, and I found myself feeling before him just as I used to feel. Of course I ought to have talked freely to him and described the life I led and the various things of interest that had happened to me in London; but I did not. Instead, I listened to him wandering on about Merivale, and the new boys, and the leak in the swimming-bath, and the scholarship his daughter had got for Girton, and his wife’s neuralgia, and his detection of the gardener’s boy in a series of thefts from the boot-room, and so on. He didn’t like London, and had to take lozenges for his throat every half-hour. He was, in fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bore, and though my conscience stung me for ingratitude, I could not throw myself into the leak in the swimming-bath, or feel that the gardener’s boy or the scholarship at Girton really mattered an atom. It was base on my part, but I could not help it, and, curiously enough, my conversation had the same effect on the Doctor that his had on me. The only difference was that he very soon stopped me when I began saying things he didn’t like, whereas I could not, of course, stop him. Without saying it unkindly, I found that the Doctor had become rather piffling in his interests. He gave me a bottle of ginger beer with my dinner, while he drank a half-bottle of burgundy, and he showed in a good many little ways that he still regarded me merely as Corkey Major, and expected me to regard him as Dr. Dunston. But one must give and take in these matters, and when he began talking about what his old pupils had done in the world, and left me entirely out of the list of those who had made their mark, I began to feel fairly full up with the Doctor, as they say, and knew only too well that in future I should manage to struggle on without seeing any more of him. Because living in London readjusts your