When my interview with the dean was over, I ordered some luncheon up to Leicester's rooms, where, as I expected, I found most of my own "set" collected, in order to hear the result. A private conference with the official aforesaid seldom boded good to the party so favoured; the dean seldom made his communications so agreeable as he might have done. In college, as in most other societies, La Rochefoucauld's maxim holds good, that "there is always something pleasant in the misfortunes of one's friends;" and whenever an unlucky wight did get into a row, he might pretty confidently reckon upon being laughed at. In fact, undergraduates considered themselves as engaged in a war of stratagem against an unholy alliance of deans, tutors, and proctors; and in every encounter the defeated party was looked upon as the deluded victim of superior ingenuity--as having been "done," in short. So, if a lark succeeded, the authorities aforesaid were decidedly done, and laughed at accordingly; if it failed, why, the other party were done, and there was still somebody to laugh at. No doubt, the jest was richer in the first case supposed; but in the second there was the additional gusto, so dear to human philanthropy, of having the victim present, and enjoying his discomfiture, which, in the case of the dons being the sufferers, was denied us. It may seem to argue something of a want of sympathy to find amusement in misfortunes which might any day be our own; but any one who ever witnessed the air of ludicrous alarm with which an undergraduate prepares to obey the summons (capable of but one interpretation)--"The dean wishes to see you, sir, at ten o'clock"--which so often, in my time at least, was sent as a whet to some of the assembled guests at a breakfast-party; whoever has been applied to on such occasions for the loan of a tolerable cap (that of the delinquent having its corners in such dilapidated condition as to proclaim its owner a "rowing man" at once), or has responded to the pathetic appeal, "Do I look _very_ seedy?"--any one to whom such absurd recollections of early days occur (and if you, good reader, are a university man, as, being a gentleman, I am bound in charity to conclude you are, and yet have no such reminiscences, allow me to suggest that you must have been a very slow coach indeed)--any one, I say once more, who knows the ridiculous figure which a man cuts when "hauled up" before the college Minos or Radamanthus, will easily forgive his friends for being inclined to laugh at him.