At Oxford Mr. Robert Hawker made acquaintance with Macbride, afterwards head of the college; and the friendship lasted through life. In after years, when Jeune, Jacobson and Macbride were heads of colleges, Robert S. Hawker went up to Oxford in his cassock and gown. The cassock was then not worn, as it sometimes is now, except by heads of colleges and professors. Mr. Hawker was therefore singular in his cassock. He was outside St. Mary’s one day, with Drs. Jeune, Jacobson and Macbride, when a friend, looking at him in his gown and cassock, said: “Why, Hawker, one would think you wanted to be taken for a head.” “About the last thing I should like to be taken for, as heads go,” was his ready reply, with a roguish glance at his three companions. Mr. Hawker has related another of his mischievous tricks when an undergraduate. There was a poor old woman named Nanny Heale, who passed for a witch. Her cottage was an old decayed hut, roofed with turf. One night Robert Hawker got on the roof, and looking down the chimney, saw her crouching over her turf fire, watching with dim eyes an iron crock, or round vessel, filled with potatoes, that were simmering in the heat. This utensil was suspended by its swing handle to an iron bar that went across the chimney. Hawker let a rope, with an iron hook at the end, slowly and noiselessly down the chimney, and, unnoted by poor Nanny’s blinking sight, caught the handle of the caldron; and it, with its mealy contents, began to ascend the chimney slowly and majestically. Nanny, thoroughly aroused by this unnatural proceeding of her old iron vessel, peered despairingly after it, and shouted at the top of her voice:— “Massy ’pon my sinful soul! art gawn off—taties and all?” The vessel was quietly grasped, and carried down in hot haste, and planted upright outside the cottage door. A knock, given on purpose, summoned the inmate, who hurried out, and stumbled over, as she afterwards interpreted the event, her penitent crock. “So, then,” was her joyful greeting,—“so, then! theer’t come back to holt, then! Ay, ’tis a-cold out o’ doors.” Good came out of evil: for her story, which she rehearsed again and again, with all the energy and persuasion of truth, reached the ears of the parochial authorities; and they, thinking that old Nanny’s wits had failed her, gave an additional shilling a week to her allowance. Hawker’s vacations were spent at Whitstone, or at Ivy Cottage, near Bude. At Whitstone he built himself a bark shanty in the wood, and set up a life-sized carved wooden figure, which he had procured in Oxford, at the door, to keep it. The figure he called “Moses.” It has long since disappeared.