But it was not all at once in 1265 that the College sprang into existence. At first Walter de Merton housed the students in lodgings in what is now called Merton Street, building a hall and kitchen to provide for their sustenance. Then followed the chapel with its grand tower, and lastly the buildings for the students. As one stands in the quaint little Mob Quad (the origin of which name has apparently been lost) it is good to realize that this is the first collegiate quadrangle known. How far the thought takes us back! How near to the fountainhead of much that has grown familiar--so familiar that few people, and no undergraduates, trouble their heads about it! It is just _there_: like the river, and the trees, and the sky it exists, but why or how it came into existence matters nothing to them. Take for example the office of Dean. In every college there is a Dean, to whom is committed the order and discipline of the place. Should there be a bonfire in the quad, it is he who comes out and frantically attempts to put it out. Should an unlucky undergraduate oversleep himself more often in the week than college rules allow, it is the Dean who sends for him and gates him, that is to say, confines him within the college gates after sunset or thereabouts. The Dean is looked upon as an "institution", not wholly delightful but still a necessary bit of Oxford life; but very few undergraduates are aware that one must go back to the times of Walter de Merton to find out how he came into being. The life of a student in the first college was planned to be lived in great simplicity. His fare was to be of the plainest, and he was not to talk at dinner. He was never to be noisy. The rules, indeed, went so far as to say that, if he wanted to talk at any time, he must talk in Latin. It may be supposed that human nature was much the same in the thirteenth century as in the twentieth, and such a life must have proved difficult to some. In order to enforce the rules one student in every ten was made a kind of "praefect", with disciplinary power over the others. Hence the "decanus", and lo! the first of all the Deans!