in brilliance was made up in energy—the energy of a pack of boys, of undergraduates—in teasing and tormenting their victim. Of course, if Neaves had possessed sense and spirit he would not have minded a straw, or he would have returned the aggressors scorn for scorn—if he had not risen to the height of repaying them good for evil—and possibly brought them to a more rational frame of mind. But unfortunately sense and spirit were just the qualities in which poor Neaves was lamentably deficient. He had already proved himself, as I have told you, a silly, weak fellow, mortally ashamed of his father’s honest calling; therefore his assailants hit him on the tenderest point, and had him at their mercy. He struggled against the persecution for some time, tried to behave as if he did not see it, then blustered a little, then knocked under. To think such gnat-bites could drive a fellow with a soul in him beside himself! They did; therefore his body was found floating in the Isis one fine morning, down among the boats, not far from a place where he had once, after his boat had bumped another boat, given a sort of pic-nic, and boasted that the greatest ‘nobs’ of his college—the wild younger son of a duke and an out-at-elbows young viscount—had been his supporters. There was some confusion in the wording of the telegram which broke the catastrophe to old Neaves. The family clung to the idea that though an accident had happened, and their Tom was the sufferer, he might still be alive. So the mother hurried to the spot along with the father. ‘I chanced to see them after they had been told the worst and were starting for home again to warn the rest of their children of what was coming. The old man did not show what he felt, but the mother——I tell you, Fan, every jury in the kingdom would, with justice, have exonerated the perpetrators of the mischief from even so much guilt as manslaughter, though one of them—I need not say he was not a ringleader—took the misfortune so much to heart that he had to be removed from Oxford to save his reason——and to this day when that woman’s face comes into my mind, I think as I did then, I would rather have been the wretched simpleton in his coffin than those men in the flush of their youth and strength and whatever goodly birthright they claimed besides. By Heavens, Fan,’ protested Oliver, in the passion which had been gathering during his story, ‘what these fellows did was the farthest removed from the chivalrous courtesy which was once held to constitute gentle bearing, it was the grossest example of caddish behaviour I ever came across.’