Christopher Clutterbuck was a common individual of a common order, but little known in this busy and toiling world. I cannot flatter myself that I am about to present to your notice that rara avis, a new character--yet there is something interesting, and even unhacknied, in the retired and simple class to which he belongs: and before I proceed to a darker period in my memoirs, I feel a calm and tranquillizing pleasure in the rest which a brief and imperfect delineation of my college companion, affords me. My friend came up to the University with the learning one about to quit the world might, with credit, have boasted of possessing, and the simplicity one about to enter it would have been ashamed to confess. Quiet and shy in his habits and his manners, he was never seen out of the precincts of his apartment, except in obedience to the stated calls of dinner, lectures, and chapel. Then his small and stooping form might be marked, crossing the quadrangle with a hurried step, and cautiously avoiding the smallest blade of the barren grass-plots, which are forbidden ground to the feet of all the lower orders of the collegiate oligarchy. Many were the smiles and the jeers, from the worse natured and better appointed students, who loitered idly along the court, at the rude garb and saturnine appearance of the humble under-graduate; and the calm countenance of the grave, but amiable man, who then bore the honour and onus of mathematical lecturer at our college, would soften into a glance of mingled approbation and pity, as he noted the eagerness which spoke from the wan cheek and emaciated frame of the ablest of his pupils, hurrying--after each legitimate interruption--to the enjoyment of the crabbed characters and worm-worn volumes, which contained for him all the seductions of pleasure, and all the temptations of youth.