Hearing from an undergraduate friend at Cardinal College of the impending retirement of Mr. Chumbleton ("Old Chum"), the famous porter of Salisbury Gate, I gladly seized the opportunity of running down to Oxford to gain some fresh sidelights on the inner life of the University. Cardinal College, unlike Balliol, Magdalen and New College, has never shown itself responsive to the new spirit. There are probably fewer Socialists in Peckover than in any other quad in Oxford. The old feudal traditions, though somewhat mitigated, still survive. You still hear the characteristic Mayfair accent and recognise a curious lack of that Moral Uplift without which, as Sir ROBERTSON NICOLL finely says, a man is no better than a mummy. And yet I own to having been strangely attracted by these well-groomed scions of a vanishing breed, with their finely chiselled features, their clipped colloquialisms and their cheerful arrogance. There is something engaging as well as pathetic in these unruffled countenances, blind to the realities of modern life and the need of that fraternal fellowship which alone can bring peace to the head that wears a crown or a coronet. Mr. Chumbleton, who was just going off duty when I arrived, cordially invited me into his inner sanctum and offered me a glass of gin and green Chartreuse, the favourite beverage, he assured me, of the late Duke of Midhurst, whose scout he had been in the "seventies." Of that strange and meteoric figure, who was subsequently devoured by a crocodile on the Blue Nile, Mr. Chumbleton spoke with genuine affection. "He was something like a Dook," said the old man, "and not one of your barley-water-drinking faddists. Yes, in those days a Dook was a Dook and not a cock-shy for demigods [? demagogues]. I can remember," he went on, "when there were three Dooks in residence at the same time, the Dook of Midhurst, the Dook of St. Ives and the Dook of Clumber. But the Dook of Midhurst was the pick of the bunch. Why, once he went into a grocer's shop in the High and asked for two pounds of treacle. 'How will you have it?' asked the grocer, who was the baldest-headed man I ever seen. 'In my hat,' said the Dook, whipping off his bowler and holding it out. As soon as it was full, before you could say Jack Robinson, he popped it on the grocer's head and ran out of the shop."