On I went, with my courage screwed to the sticking place, but I must confess with my heart thumping against my ribs prodigiously, when immediately under the low-browed archway—I have not seen it these twenty years and better; yet there it stands as palpable before me as if it were not a trick of memory—the low-browed archway giving access by an ascending stair to the hall redolent of six year old mutton, and by a descending flight to the college butteries and cellars, redolent of audit ale, and that most cloud-compelling compound, of hot ale, sherry, brandy, cloves, nutmegs, toast and cinnamon, which gods call nectar, and college men Caius copus—when under that low-browed archway, I say, of what should I become aware, but of my tall friend of the Highflyer, arrayed like myself in a cap and gown, which testified by their resplendent newness that he too was a freshman. No words can, I believe, adequately describe the mutual delight of that recognition. He, it appears, was in precisely the same predicament with myself! He, like myself, had remained ensconced in his own _rooms_, not daring to stir out and meet the animadverting eyes of junior and senior sophomores, until the summons of the dinner-bell, and the yet more imperative commands of an esurient stomach had driven him out, as they have many a hero both before and since, to do and dare the worst. Instead then of a morose and stately Don, steeped to the lips in scorn of verdant youngsters, each of us had before him an innocent, and equally imperilled, brother freshman. Confound all etiquette! there was no one near to see! so out went both our hands at once! “Believe I had the pleasure of traveling from the north—” “Think we came up together in the Highflyer—” “Devilish little pleasure about it, however,” said I, Frank Forester, mustering a little of the spice of the original fiend that possesses me. “Deuced dull work it was, certainly, but, my dear sir, I took you for a Don.” “And I you—and for a mighty stiff one too.” “To tell you the truth,” said the North Briton, “I have been thanking Heaven all the morning that I should never see that sulky little fellow again.” Little! confound his picture! I stand five feet ten in my stockings, and measure thirty-eight inches over the chest—but, sure enough, _little_ I was beside _him_; for he was in truth a very son of Anak. Six feet four without his shoes, and yet so exquisitely fashioned, and in so perfect proportion, that unless there stood some one near him, against whom to institute a comparison, you would not have taken him for a six-footer. Alas! that very prematureness of perfect size and stature had perhaps sapped already the foundations of that noble piece of architecture, and foredoomed it to decay as speedy and untimely as its growth had been unduly rapid.