soon “the curled darlings of our nation” find out the weak places of the professor. He may implore silence, but the more noise prevails. If he threatens, revenge follows the next day, for suddenly and unaccountably half the students in the class turn lame, and hobble into the lecture-room leaning on bludgeons, with which, knocked against the seats, they interrupt the speaker until his voice is drowned in the uproar. One poor old professor (who, by the way, lived in continual terror of a very painful disease) had so completely lost the control of his students, that he had to sit before them in mute despair, and had the pleasure of hearing one of them invite him by his Christian name, “Sandy,” to lay himself upon the table, in order that he—the curled darling—might attempt a little lithotomy. Generally, however, these uproars are got up good-humouredly to bring out the professor, who perfectly understands what the students want. They are tired of the hypothenuse, the sine and the cosine, and they want a little fun. There never was a better hand at this sort of work than the late Dr. Thomas Gillespie, a brother-in-law of Lord Campbell. He was not only professor of Latin, but a devotee of the fishing-rod, a poet of much pathos, a minister of much eloquence, and a talker boiling over with jest and anecdote. He would lay down his Horace, which he knew by heart, and joke with the students till the tears rolled down their cheeks. Regularly every year he told the same pet anecdotes, and they knew what was coming; but his manner was always irresistible. One of his anecdotes was about a dial. He had a dial in his garden which required mending. He got a mason to do the job, and the bill of charge ran as follows: “For mending the deil—1_s._” The old fellow enjoyed it more and more every time he told the story, and after five minutes of this kind of play he would return to his Latin sapphics, and stand over the stream of poetry with all the patient gravity of an angler.