4 THE DOWNFALL OF THE DERVISHES

to be strongly flavoured with the ancient Egyptian spirit of ‘bricks without straw.” Under time pressure of this kind one’s ethical system becomes quite distorted. How heartily one gets to hate the good little boys and girls who write four or five pages of cram! With what satisfaction one surveys the work of the

stripling whose indifference or ignorance has

curtailed the product of his mental training within the more reasonable limits of a few

lines, to be marked after a single synoptic glance! However, with. the aid of several

hirelings, whose unskilled labour sufficed to execute the merely clerical portion of my

task, I contrived to break the back of this obstacle to my happiness. The penultimate batch was finished at the Charing Cross Hotel, the final lot completed just before our

train steamed into Folkestone.

I shook off the dust of these papers from my garments, and stepped upon the steamer’s deck a free agent. Away with lectures and pupils and essays, the solemnity. of the Senior

Common Room, and the good - humoured

toleration of the smart undergraduate! Fare-

well for many a week to dear Oxford—with