When I was fourteen, a little old Frenchman came to lodge with us; he had been persecuted under the old regime for being a philosopher; he filled my head with odd crotchets which, more or less, have stuck there ever since. At eighteen I was sent to St. John’s College, Cambridge. My father was rich enough to have let me go up in the higher rank of a pensioner, but he had lately grown avaricious; he thought that I was extravagant; he made me a sizar, perhaps to spite me. Then, for the first time, those inequalities in life which the Frenchman had dinned into my ears met me practically. A sizar! another name for a dog! I had such strength, health, and spirits, that I had more life in my little finger than half the fellow-commoners--genteel, spindle-shanked striplings, who might have passed for a collection of my grandfather’s walking-canes--bad in their whole bodies. And I often think,” continued Gawtrey, “that health and spirits have a great deal to answer for! When we are young we so far resemble savages who are Nature’s young people--that we attach prodigious value to physical advantages. My feats of strength and activity--the clods I thrashed--and the railings I leaped--and the boat-races I won--are they not written in the chronicle of St. John’s? These achievements inspired me with an extravagant sense of my own superiority; I could not but despise the rich fellows whom I could have blown down with a sneeze. Nevertheless, there was an impassable barrier between me and them--a sizar was not a proper associate for the favourites of fortune! But there was one young man, a year younger myself, of high birth, and the heir to considerable wealth, who did not regard me with the same supercilious insolence as the rest; his very rank, perhaps, made him indifferent to the little conventional formalities which influence persons who cannot play at football with this round world; he was the wildest youngster in the university--lamp-breaker--tandem-driver--mob-fighter--a very devil in short--clever, but not in the reading line--small and slight, but brave as a lion. Congenial habits made us intimate, and I loved him like a brother--better than a brother--as a dog loves his master. In all our rows I covered him with my body. He had but to say to me, ‘Leap into the water,’ and I would not have stopped to pull off my coat. In short, I loved him as a proud man loves one who stands betwixt him and contempt,--as an affectionate man loves one who stands between him and solitude. To cut short a long story: my friend, one dark night, committed an outrage against discipline, of the most unpardonable character. There was a sanctimonious, grave old fellow of the College, crawling home from a tea-party; my friend and another of his set seized, blindfolded, and handcuffed this poor wretch, carried him, vi et armis, back to the house of an old maid whom he had been courting for the last ten years, fastened his pigtail (he wore a long one) to the knocker, and so left him.