If he have a family in the town, he is hardly a student like the others. He has his comrades within cry, his houses of call, girls here and there whom he has met at dances in friendly houses, sisters and cousins of his own or of his friends--in short, all the machinery of social life to carry him on. But for the great majority life is other and sterner. As Milton lamenting his blindness, the stranger student mourns wisdom and life "at one entrance quite shut out." The influence of women, sweeter than that of the Pleiades, is absent, save in the shape of seamy-faced grim-mouthed landladies, or, in a favourable case, which was ours (or might have been), our red-cheeked, frank-tongued, oncoming wench in the milk-house at Echobank, and the baker's daughter across the way. The first result of this is a great outbreak of sentimentality among the callowlings. They have pictures (oh, such caricatures!) to carry in breast-pockets--or locks of hair, like mine. Their hearts are inflammable as those of the flaxen-haired youths I met afterwards in the universities of Germany, only living on oatmeal, without sausages, and less florid with beer. Yet on the whole, the aforesaid empty purse aiding, we were filled with not dishonest sentiment, keen as sleuth-hounds on the track of knowledge, and disputatious as only lads of Calvinistic training can be. Our landladies were much alike, our rooms furnished with the same Spartan plainness. Only in Mistress Craven I happened on a good one, and abode with her all the days of my stay at College, till the way opened out for me to wider horizons and a humaner life. But I can see the room yet, and the narrow passage which led to it. Here, close to the door, was a clock with a striking apparatus of surprising shrillness to warn us of the flight of the half-hours. "Ting!" another gone! Then, as the hour drew near, this academic clock cleared its decks for real action--almost it might be said that it cleared its throat, such a roopy gasping crow did it emit. This was technically called "the warning." And three times a day at the sound of it we rose, gathered our books and fled fleetfoot for the college. The clock at Mistress Craven's was set ten minutes fast, so as to leave us time to flee down the Pleasance, dodge through a side alley, cut Simon's Square diagonally, debouch upon Drummond Street (shunning Rutherford's change-house, with its "kittle" step down into the cellar), and lo! there, big, barren, grey, grave, cauldrife as a Scots winter, was the College of King James--with the bell, unheard in the side-streets, fairly "gollying" at us--an appalling volume of sound--yet one which, on the whole, we minded less than the skirl and rasp of Mistress Craven's family clock.