cooks and butlers were sometimes called upon to furnish a banquet of “nine hundred messes of meat, with twelve hundred hogsheads of beer and four hundred and sixteen of wine,” as at Balliol, when a Chancellor of twenty-two years of age was installed: the porter was prominent, but as yet much subordinated to the head of the college, to whom he delivered the keys at an early hour: the barber, who was sometimes also the porter, was the welcome dispenser of true and false news, and at Wadham survived until the sixties of last century, when he insisted that the amateur actors should have their wigs dressed by him, under pain of being betrayed to the Warden. Of the old servants--_heu prisca fides_--we can only guess at the devotion, from the story of old Thomas Allen’s servitor, who was overawed by his master’s mathematical instruments and his reputation of astrologer, and would “impose on freshmen or simple people” by telling them that spirits were often to be met coming up Allen’s staircase “like bees.” John Earle has preserved the ways of an old college butler, from his experience as a fellow of Merton. “An old College Butler is none of the worst students in the house, for he keeps the set hours at his book more duly than any. His authority is great over men’s good names, which he charges many times with shrewd aspersions, which they can hardly wipe off without payment. His Box and Counters prove him to be a man of reckoning; yet he is stricter in his accounts than a usurer, and delivers not a farthing without writing. He doubles the pain of _Gallobelgicus_, for his books go out once a quarter, and they are much in the same nature, brief notes and sums of affairs, and are out of request as soon. His comings in are like a Tailor’s from the shreds of bread, the chippings, and remnants of the broken crust: excepting his vails from the barrel, which poor folks buy for their hogs, but drink themselves. He divides a halfpenny loaf with more subtility than _Kekerman_, and subdivides the _a primo ortum_ so nicely, that a stomach of great capacity can hardly apprehend it. He is a very sober man, considering his manifold temptations of drink and strangers, and if he be overseen, ’tis within his own liberties, and no man ought to take exceptions. He is never so well pleas’d with his place, as when a Gentleman is beholding to him for showing him the Buttery, whom he greets with a cup of single beer and sliced manchet, and tells him ’tis the fashion of the College. He domineers over Freshmen when they first come to the Hatch, and puzzles them with strange language of Cues and Cees, and some broken Latin which he has learnt at his Bin. His faculty extraordinary is the warming of a pair of Cards, and telling out a dozen of Counters for Post and Pair, and no man is more methodical in these businesses. Thus he spends his age, till the tap of it is run out, and then a fresh one is set abroach.” THE OXFORD DAY CHAPTER VI THE OXFORD DAY