looked, as his neighbour, Mr. Bouncer, kindly informed him, "uncommon seedy, and doosid fishy about the eyes;" and it was some days even before he had quite recovered from the novel excitement of Mr. Smalls' "quiet party." CHAPTER IX. MR. VERDANT GREEN ATTENDS LECTURES AND, IN DESPITE OF SERMONS, HAS DEALINGS WITH FILTHY LUCRE. OUR freshman, like all other freshmen, now began to think seriously of work, and plunged desperately into all the lectures that it was possible for him to attend, beginning every course with a zealousness that shewed him to be filled with the idea that such a plan was eminently necessary for the attainment of his degree; in all this in every respect deserving the Humane Society's medal for his brave plunge into the depths of the Pierian spring, to fish up the beauties that had been immersed therein by the poets of old. When we say that our freshman, like other freshmen, "began" this course, we use the verb advisedly; for, like many other freshmen who start with a burst in learning's race, he soon got winded, and fell back among the ruck. But the course of lectures, like the course of true love, will not always run smooth, even to those who undertake it with the same courage as Mr. Verdant Green. The dryness of the daily routine of lectures, which varied about as much as the steak-and-chop, chop-and-steak dinners of ancient taverns, was occasionally relieved by episodes, which, though not witty in themselves, were yet the cause of wit in others; for it takes but little to cause amusement in a lecture-room, where a bad construe; or the imaginative excuses of late-comers; or the confusion of some young gentleman who has to turn over the leaf of his Greek play and finds it uncut; or the pounding of the same gentleman in the middle of the first chorus; or his offensive extrication therefrom through the medium of some Cumberland barbarian; or the officiousness of the same barbarian to pursue the lecture when every one else has, with singular unanimity, "read no further;" - all these circumstances, although perhaps dull enough in themselves, are nevertheless productive of some mirth in a lecture-room. But if there were often late-comers to the lectures, there were occasionally early-goers from them. Had Mr. Four-in-hand Fosbrooke an engagement to ride his horse ~Tearaway~ in the amateur steeple-chase, and was he constrained, by circumstances over which (as he protested) he had no control, to put [84 ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN]