the very best-deserved first class that ever was won. The passage of the Alps to a Hannibal or a Napoleon was a puny feat compared with the passing of an examination by a Wetherhead. We took him on our shoulders, and bore him aloft in triumph, a banner-bearer, with a towel for banner, marching at the head of the procession. “You may laugh, but it was the towels pulled me through, old fellow,” he said to me, smiling, his great face expanding with delight. “Stay there, and don’t go any farther, Leathers,” I advised, when he proclaimed his intention of going up for the degrees. “Nonsense!” said he, and, in spite of everybody’s warnings, Wetherhead “went in” for the B.A. It was a sight to see him in the agonies of study; his eyes almost starting out of his head as the day wore on, and around that head, arranged in turban fashion, an enormous towel reeking with moisture. “How many towels to-day, Leathers?” “How’s the reservoir, Leatherhead?” those impudent youngsters would cry out. As time went on and the examination drew near the whole college became interested in Wetherhead and his prospects of success. Bets were made on him, and bets were made on his towels. The wit of our class wrote an essay--which, it was whispered aloud, had reached the professors’ room, and been read aloud there to their intense amusement--on “Towels _vs._ Degrees; or, The probabilities of success, measured by the quantity of water on the brain.” He bore it all good-humoredly, even the threat to crown him with towels instead of laurel if he passed and went up for his degree. A dark whisper reached me, away in the country at the time, that he had failed, that the failure had touched his brain, and that he was cut down half-strangled one morning from his own door-key, to which he had suspended himself by means of a wet towel; which, instead of its usual position around his brow, had fastened itself around his throat. Of course that was a malicious libel; for I met the poor fellow soon after, looking the ghost of himself. “How was it, Wetherhead?” I asked. “I don’t know, old fellow,” he responded mournfully. “I got through splendidly the first few days; but after that things began to get muddled and mixed up somehow, so that I could hardly tell one from another. It was all there, but something had got out of order. I felt that it was all there, but there was too much to hold together. The fact is, _I missed my towel_. A towel or two would have set it all right again. The machine had got too hot, and wanted a little cooling off; but I couldn’t march in there, you know, with a big towel round my head; so I failed.”