Then row, dear Etonians and Westminsters, row, Row, hard-fisted craftsmen on Thames and on Tyne, Labuan,[12] New Zealand, your chasubles[13] peel, and In one spurt of hard work, and hard rowing, combine Our maundering critics may prate as they please Of glory departed and influence flown— Row and work, boys of England, on rivers and seas, And the old land shall hold, firm as ever, her own. [11] “Dead noser,” the Tyne phrase for a wind in your teeth. [12] The Bishops were famous oarsmen. Dr. Macdougal rowed bow oar in Menzies’ boat, and was a dear friend of my brother’s. [13] Query: Do Bishops wear “chasubles?”—G.E.H. [Note appended by my brother to the original copy.] CHAPTER V. _DEGREE._ The Schools were now very near ahead of him, and, though not much behindhand with his work, considering the intensity of his exertions in other directions, he was anxious to make the most of the months that were left. He read very hard in vacation, but, when term began again, had to encounter unusual difficulties. His father’s half-hinted warnings against a large acquaintance proved prophetic. In fact, I used to wonder how he ever got his reading done at all, and was often not a little annoyed with many of my own contemporaries, and other younger men still, even to the last batch of freshmen, whose fondness for his society was untempered by any thought of examinations, or honours. Not one of them could give a wine, or a breakfast party, without him, and his good-nature kept him from refusing when he found that his presence gave real pleasure. Then he never had the heart to turn them out of his rooms, or keep his oak habitually sported; and when that most necessary ceremony for a reading man had been performed, it was not respected as it should have been. My rooms were on the same staircase, half a flight below his (which looked into the quadrangle, while mine looked out over the back of the College), so that I could hear all that happened. Our College lectures were all over at one. It was well for him if he had secured quiet up to that hour; but, in any case, regularly within a few minutes after the clock had struck, I used to hear steps on the stairs, and a pause before his oak. If it was sported, kicking or knocking would follow, with imploring appeals, “Now, old ’un” (the term of endearment by which he went in College), “do open—I know you’re in—only for two minutes.” A short persistence seldom failed; and soon other men followed on the same errand, “for a few minutes only,” till it was time for lunch, to which he would then be dragged off in one of their rooms, and his oak never get sported again till late at night. Up to his last term in College this went on, though not to quite the same extent; and even then there was one incorrigible young idler, who never failed in his “open sesame,” and wasted more of my brother’s time than all the rest of the College. But