Nevertheless the papers arrived. He was, in reality, no fool, and the Cambridge ‘Little Go’ is not the most difficult examination under the sun. At the end of May he went up to Cambridge. If one may judge by certain picturesque romances concerned with University life and recently popular amongst us, one is to understand that that first vision of a University thrills with all the passion of one’s first pipe, one’s first beer and one’s first bedmaker or scout, as the case may be. The weather was chill and damp. He was placed in a tiny room, where he knocked his head against the fine old rafters and listened to mice behind the wainscot. His food was horrible, his bedmaker a repulsive old woman, and the streets were filled with young men, who knew not Henry and pushed him into the gutter. He hated everyone whom he saw at the examination, from the large, red-faced gentleman who watched him as he wrote, down to the thin and uncleanly youth who bit his nails at the seat next to his own. He walked down Petty Cury and hated it; he strolled tip the King’s Parade and hated that too. He went to King’s College Chapel and heard a dull anthem, was spoken to by an enormous porter for walking on the grass and fell over the raised step in the gateway. He was conceited and lonely and hungry. He despised all the world, and would have given his eyes for a friend. He looked forward to his three years in this city (“The best time of your life, my boy. What I would give to have those dear old days over again”) with inexpressible loathing. He knew, however, three hours of happiness and exultation. This joy came to him during the English Essay—the last paper of the examination. There were four subjects from which he might choose, and he selected something that had to do with ‘The Connection between English History and English Literature.’ Of facts he had really the vaguest notion. He seemed to know, through hearsay rather than personal examination, that Oliver Cromwell was something responsible for ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, that that dissolute monarch Charles II. had to do with the brilliance and audacity of Mr. Congreve and Mr. Wycherley, that Queen Anne in some way produced Pope and Robespierre, Wordsworth, and Queen Victoria, Charlotte Mary Yonge (he had cared very deeply for ‘The Daisy Chain’), and our Indian Empire Mr. Rudyard Kipling. He knew it all as vaguely as this, but he wrote—he wrote divinely, gloriously ecstatically, so that the three hours were but as one moment and the grim nudity of the examination-room as the marbled palaces of his own fantastic dreams. Such ecstasy had he known when he began that story about the man who climbed the ricketty stairs. Such ecstasy had been born on that day when he had read the first page of the novel about Forests—such ecstasy had, he knew in spite of itself, received true nourishment from that enemy of their house, Philip.