It was a trying year to Tom, this third and last year; full of large dreams and small performances, of hopes and struggles, ending in failure and disappointment. The common pursuits of the place had lost their freshness, and with it much of their charm. He was beginning to feel himself in a cage, and to beat against the bars of it. Squire Brown was passing through Oxford, and paid his son a visit in the last term. Tom gave a small wine-party, which went off admirably, and the squire enlarged upon the great improvement in young men and habits of the university, especially in the matter of drinking. Tom had only opened three bottles of port. In his time the men would have drunk certainly not less than a bottle a man. But as the squire walked back to his hotel he was deeply moved at the Radical views his son now held. He could not understand these new notions of young men, and thought them mischievous and bad. At the same time, he was too fair a man to try to dragoon his son out of anything which he really believed. The fact had begun to dawn on the squire that the world had changed a good deal since his time; while Tom, on his part, valued his father's confidence and love above his own opinions. By degrees the honest beliefs of father and son no longer looked monstrous to one another, and the views of each of them were modified. * * * * * One more look must be taken at the old college. Our hero is up in the summer term, keeping his three weeks' residence, the necessary preliminary to an M.A. degree. We find him sitting in Hardy's rooms; tea is over, scouts out of college, candles lighted, and silence reigning, except when distant sounds of mirth come from some undergraduates' rooms on the opposite side of the quad. "Why can't you give a fellow his degree quietly," says Tom, "without making him come and kick his heels here for three weeks?" "You ungrateful dog! Do you mean to say you haven't enjoyed coming back, and sitting in dignity in the bachelors' seats in chapel and at the bachelors' table in hall, and thinking how much wiser you are than the undergraduates? Besides your old friends want to see you, and you ought to want to see them." "Well, I'm very glad to see you again, old fellow. But who else is there I care to see? My old friends are gone, and the youngsters look on me as a sort of don, and I don't appreciate the dignity. You have never broken with the place. And then you always did your duty, and have done the college credit. You can't enter into the feelings of a fellow who wasted three parts of his time here." "Come, come, Tom! You might have read more, certainly, and taken a higher degree. But, after all, I believe your melancholy comes from your not being asked to pull in the boat." "Perhaps it does. Don't you call it degrading to be pulling in the torpid in one's old age?"