Although the father took it for granted that his son had immediately forgotten his home and arrived in an instant at man’s estate--as far as that permits of getting drunk--he was not always in the right. To a certain extent the anxieties of the mother were justified, for, on arriving at Oxford, the freshman did not always fall on a bed of clover. In many instances he was lucky to get a bed at all in some poky little garret with one window, through which could be obtained a minute view of sky and stars, and which was ice-cold in winter and in summer stuffy to a degree. However large the college there were always more men in residence than could be properly housed. Colman said of the House, one of the biggest colleges in Oxford, that it “was so completely cramm’d, that shelving garrets, and even unwholesome cellars, were inhabited by young gentlemen, in whose father’s families the servants could not be less liberally accommodated.” He refers also to a fellow Westminster boy who was “stuffed into one of these underground dog-holes.” Then, too, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century there prevailed a system of ragging freshers which did not tend to make them any the less homesick. They were swindled by their scouts, and shamefully misused by their bedmakers. To add to their discomfort their tutors were in many cases fast allies of the bottle, and totally unable to render them any assistance in the matter of finding their feet. Colman made a very illuminative reference, from his own experience, to the scurvy tricks which the scouts and bedmakers played upon the long-suffering fresher. “My two mercenaries,” he wrote, “having to do with a perfect greenhorn, laid in all the articles for me which I wanted--wine, tea, sugar, coals, candles, bed and table linen--with many useless etcetera, which they told me I wanted--charging me for everything full half more than they had paid, and then purloining from me full half of what they had sold.”