Ch. 8: The Last Term

It was within a few days of the holidays, the term-end examinations,
and, more important still, the issue of the College paper which
Beetle edited. He had been cajoled into that office by the
blandishments of Stalky and McTurk and the extreme rigor of study
law. Once installed, he discovered, as others have done before him,
that his duty was to do the work while his friends criticized. Stalky
christened it the "Swillingford Patriot," in pious memory of
Sponge--and McTurk compared the output unfavorably with Ruskin and De
Quincey. Only the Head took an interest in the publication, and his
methods were peculiar. He gave Beetle the run of his brown-bound,
tobacco-scented library; prohibiting nothing, recommending nothing.
There Beetle found a fat arm-chair, a silver inkstand, and unlimited
pens and paper. There were scores and scores of ancient dramatists;
there were Hakluyt, his voyages; French translations of Muscovite
authors called Pushkin and Lermontoff; little tales of a heady and
bewildering nature, interspersed with unusual songs--Peacock was that
writer's name; there was Borrow's "Lavengro"; an odd theme, purporting
to be a translation of something, called a "Ruba'iyat," which the
Head said was a poem not yet come to its own; there were hundreds of
volumes of verse---Crashaw; Dryden; Alexander Smith; L. E. L.; Lydia
Sigourney; Fletcher and a purple island; Donne; Marlowe's "Faust ";
and--this made McTurk (to whom Beetle conveyed it) sheer drunk for
three days--Ossian; "The Earthly Paradise"; "Atalanta in Calydon";
and Rossetti--to name only a few. Then the Head, drifting in under
pretense of playing censor to the paper, would read here a verse and
here another of these poets, opening up avenues. And, slow breathing,
with half-shut eyes above his cigar, would he speak of great men
living, and journals, long dead, founded in their riotous youth; of
years when all the planets were little new-lit stars trying to find
their places in the uncaring void, and he, the Head, knew them as
young men know one another. So the regular work went to the dogs,
Beetle being full of other matters and meters, hoarded in secret and
only told to McTurk of an afternoon, on the sands, walking high and
disposedly round the wreck of the Armada galleons, shouting and
declaiming against the long-ridged seas.

Thanks in large part to their house-master's experienced distrust, the
three for three consecutive terms had been passed over for promotion
to the rank of prefect--an office that went by merit, and carried
with it the honor of the ground-ash, and liberty, under restrictions,
to use it.

"_But_," said Stalky, "come to think of it, we've done more