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At once five obscure dons made brisk application for the vacant place, and Gray, sensitive and lacking the arts of the politician, did not expect the place. But the author of the Elegy was no longer to be neglected. He soon received a letter highly complimenting his work and offering him the professorship.
He wore spectacles that flashed more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Edmond de Goncourt. He knew every one in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He was Paris in Oxford. It was whispered that, so soon as he had polished off his selection of dons, he was going to include a few undergraduates.
Soon also I found that the life of the place, like the place, had lost its charm and its tradition. Gone were the contrasts that made it wonderful. That feud between undergraduates and dons latent, in the old days, only at times when it behoved the two academic grades to unite against the townspeople was one of the absurdities of the past.
The Dons have met several times; and several tutors are to be discommoned, and their names stuck up against the buttery-door. Meanwhile the Marshal, with two bulldogs, is keeping guard before the Catholic chapel; and, to complete it, that old drunken fellow Topham is reported, out of malice, when called in to cut the Warden of St. Mary's hair, to have made a clean white tonsure atop of him."
But I must stop, for I see I am beginning to make most dangerous admissions. If I go on, indeed, I am likely enough to become as much disliked by the readers of the present day as I was by the Oxford Dons of forty years ago.
The remark of Chane that followed, although uttered sotto voce, I could distinctly hear. It was sufficiently amusing. "The captain don't want yez to destroy what'll be his own some day, when he marries one of thim young Dons. Here comes the owld one, and, by the powers! he's got a big paper; he's goin' to make over the property!"
Down in Nature's laboratory, radiated golden veins creep along between feathery rifts of virgin quartz. They are the treasures of the careless gnomes. Not till years later will Marshall pick up the first nugget of gleaming gold in Sutter's mill-race at Coloma. The "auri sacra fames" will bring thousands from the four quarters of the earth to sweep away "the last of the Dons."
I was Greek and Latin proof, and all I really gained from my learned teachers was two very close and intimate friends, and the privilege of meeting at the house of the one and in the rooms in the College of the other, a good many of the abler Dons, young and old, and getting on good terms with them.
The Spanish guard-ship attacked the pirate, but Rackam being close in behind a little island, she could do but little execution where she lay; the Dons therefore warped into the channel that evening, in order to make sure of her the next morning. Rackam finding his case desperate, and that there was hardly any possibility of escaping, resolved to attempt the following enterprise.
They were seen also to be steering different courses for the purpose of cutting her off. Lord Claymore, however retained his usual composure. "Night will be down upon us soon, and then we will give the Dons the slip," he observed calmly, and gave the order to have a lantern fixed on a ballasted cask prepared. This was for some time carried over the stern and then lowered into the water.
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