Mr. Smedley at once confessed that he had no knowledge or taste for mechanics, but he had the patience and good-nature to walk up and down this stone platform for three-quarters of an hour. He stood observing my mother's very eager examination with my father of the defects in the wooden roof, and pointing out where it had been cut away to admit the stone, as a proof that the stone roof had been an afterthought; and at last turned to me with a look of astonishment. "Mrs. Edgeworth seems to have this taste for mechanics _too._" He spoke of it as a kind of mania. So I nodded at him very gravely, and answered, "Yes, you will find us all tinctured with it, more or less." At last, to Mr. Smedley's great joy, he got my father alive off this roof, and on his way to Downing, the new college of which Leslie Foster talked so much, and said was to be like the Parthenon. Shockingly windy walk: thought my brains would have been blown out. Passed Peter House, and saw the rooms in which Gray lived, and the irons of his fire-escape at the window. Warned Mr. Smedley of the danger of my father being caught by a coachmaker's yard which we were to pass. My father overheard me, laughed, and contented himself with a side glance at the springs of gigs, and escaped that danger. I nearly disgraced myself, as the company were admiring the front of Emmanuel College, by looking at a tall man stooping to kiss a little child. Got at last, in spite of the wind and coachmakers' yards, within view of Downing College, and was sadly disappointed. It will never bear comparison with King's College Chapel. Home to dinner: Mr. Farish and Mr. Smedley were very agreeable and entertaining, and _did_ very well together, though such different persons. Mr. Farish is the most primitive, simple-hearted man I ever saw. The bells were ringing in honour of Professor Farish's election, or, as Mr. Smedley said, at the Professor's expense. Farish insisted upon it very coolly that they were not ringing for him, but for a shoulder of mutton. "A shoulder of mutton! what do you mean?" "Why, a man left to the University a shoulder of mutton for every Thursday, on condition that the bells should always ring for him on that day: so this is for the shoulder of mutton." Mr. Farish paid us no compliments in words, but his coming to spend the evening with us the day of his election, when I suppose he might have been feasted by all the grand and learned in the University, was, I think, the greatest honour my father has received since he came to England; and so he felt it.