No one of consequence called him by his own name even. The name of Archibald Arundel was all but unknown in Oxford. It appeared occasionally on lecture lists, and sometimes over an article, charged with learning and grace, in one of the quarterlies. Postmen and college porters knew it, and at the foot of staircase XXXIV, which crept spirally up an ivy-clad tower, the surprising legend was still decipherable, in faint letters of an outworn mode, constant amid the ever-changing list above and below it-- 6. MR. ARUNDEL. But Mongo! Who didn’t know who Mongo was? Who in Oxford? Who in England? In all Asia and in all Africa? Who indeed? And Gaveston of course knew that one ought to call on Mongo well within one’s first week. It was of prime importance for any Wallace fresher to be known from the first as a Mongoon--for such was the name given to the brilliant and elegant group of undergraduates who used Mongo as their confidant and his rooms as their idling-place. And Gav had been careful, that very afternoon, to obtain from David Paunceford, himself a deservedly popular Mongoon, some essential facts of this celebrated _cénacle_ and its godfather. But how hard they were to come by! No one could tell why Archibald Arundel was called Mongo. Even Mongo did not know. And now, of all his contemporaries who might have been able to dissipate the obscuring mists of etymology, none were surviving. “Men of _my_ year?” Mongo would say, a little sadly, when his freshmen friends asked about old days at Wallace. “But you’re all men of my year.” And his strange elusive smile made every one believe him. No one knew his age, but the years lay light upon Mongo as dew upon a rose. His round pink face bore scarcely a wrinkle and certainly not one crowsfoot. His curly golden locks had just the faintest flecking of silver about the temples, and his enemies were bitter enough to allege that these few grey hairs were false. His smile was free and open as a young boy’s, and his voice seemed hardly to have lost its adolescent uncertainties for more than a few happy months. Every day, wet or fine, Mongo might be seen moving blithely about Wallace, the college that had known him in its quadrangles as matriculand and freshman, as fellow and tutor, as junior dean and Rickaby Lecturer, as acting-bursar and at the last as Dean. Often enough he was mistaken for an undergraduate. It may have been his clothes, with their deceptive air of callowness. Who knows? But innocent strangers who looked through the albums of college groups would often point to one constant figure as the quintessential undergraduate of his period. “How typical!” they would comment, pointing to Mongo in the group of Hilary term, 1843. “How typical!” pointing to the, yes, distinctly but temporarily whiskered Mongo of 1879. “How typical!” as they admired the _négligé_ of his flannel “bags” of 1907.