"Twenty pounds," rejoined Mrs. Spurling. "I witnessed the bet."

"Here he is!" cried Ireton, as the knocking was heard without. "Get ready the irons, Caliban."

"Wait a bit, massa," replied the grinning negro,-" lilly bit -see all right fust."

By this time, the chair had been brought into the Lodge. "You've got him ?" demanded Ireton.

"Safe inside," replied the chairman, wiping the heat from his brow; "we've run all the way."

"Where's Mr. Shotbolt?" asked Austin.

"The gen'l'man 'll be here directly. He was detained. T'other gen'l'man said the letter 'ud explain all."

"Detained!" echoed Marvel. "That 's odd. But, let's see the prisoner."

The chair was then opened. "Shotbolt! by

cried Austin, as the captive was dragged forth. "I've won, after all.”

Exclamations of wonder burst from all. Mrs. Spurling bit her lips to conceal her mirth. Caliban absolutely crowed with delight.

"Hear the letter," said Ireton, breaking the seal. "This is the way in which I will serve all who attempt to apprehend me.' It is signed JACK SHEPPARD."

"And, so Jack Sheppard has sent back Shotbolt in this pickle," said Langley.

"So it appears," replied Marvel. "Untie his arms, and take off that handkerchief. The poor fellow's half smothered." "I guess what share you've had in this," whispered Austin to Mrs. Spurling.

"Never mind," replied the tapstress. "You've won your wager."

Half an hour after this occurrence, when it had been sufficiently laughed at and discussed; when the wager had been settled, and the chairman dismissed with the remaining three guineas, which Shotbolt was compelled to pay; Ireton arose, and signified his intention of stepping across the street to inform Mr. Wild of the circumstance.

"As it's getting late, and the porter may be gone to bed," he observed; "I'll take the pass-key, and let myself in. Mr. Wild is sure to be up. He never retires to rest till daybreak — if at all. Come with me, Langley, and bring the lantern."

VINCENT EDEN;

OR, THE OXONIAN.

BY QUIP.

CHAPTER VIII.

A TRINITY SCHOLARSHIP.-TIDINGS OF THE EX-PRESIDENT OF THE
BROTHERS' CLUB.

THE mind of the Reverend Burnaby Birch was by no means of an imaginative order; but, even had it partaken in the highest degree of that least earthly and most delicious of our faculties, the utmost stretch and expansion thereof would never for one moment, antecedently speaking, have suggested to that worthy the possibility of such an accumulation of insults as the few first days of the present term had inflicted upon him. Neither was the mind of that aggrieved gentleman an analytical, or an inventive mind; so that, upon the receipt of the in dignity last recorded in these our pages, he was at first considerably at a loss to know how to trace home the mischief to its actual perpetrators. But, inasmuch as the Reverend Burnaby had a great idea of his own official dignity, and a proportionate sense of any attempt to lower it, he was fully determined to sift the matter to the bottom; and, accordingly, finding himself deficient in internal resources, he had recourse, like a prudent statesman, to the foreign aid of his temporary ally, the Marshal; by whose natural tact and long experience, the whole affair was speedily traced home to the "Brothers' Club;" and each individual of that singular society, including the guests of the preceding day, he forthwith confined to his respective college for the following three weeks, with a severe imposition by way of relieving the monotonous seclusion of such a situation.

As for the unfortunate Walrus, who had unquestionably been the greatest sufferer by the transaction, he received at the same time, and from the same quarter, a confidential communication, to the effect that the next time he permitted his "human face divine" to be made such an example of, he would forthwith be requested to remove the "Temple of Fashion," together with the she Walrus and her cubs, Jemes, and each and all other of the appurtenances thereof, on a migratory expedition to some colony for the reception of retired and discommoned tradesmen.

From the sweeping sentence of temporary captivity thus proctorially pronounced against the offending "Brothers," and their guests, our hero, however innocent of the crime which had led to it, found himself by no means exempted. It is probably owing to this circumstance that the manuscript diary, in which my friend Eden carefully registered the various feel

VOL. VI.

2 B

ings and incidents of his college life, and which he has since made over to me for the purpose of giving these memoirs to the world, contains little else beyond trifling anecdotes relative to the internal state of the college, its chapel, and its lectures, during that period of his career.

There is one of these anecdotes so strikingly illustrative of the ingenuity of our friend Mr. Richardson Lane's character, that, for the benefit of future Freshmen, I feel tempted to transcribe it. It is this. Whenever,-which, being interpreted must be understood to mean five days out of every six, — that gentleman found himself at a loss for the exact meaning of any phrase in the course of lecture, his invariable practice was to manufacture an impromptu single rap with his knuckles underneath the table. The tutor instantly rushed to the door to say he was too busy to see any one, and by the time he returned, the meaning of the ambiguous word had been elicited from some better-informed neighbour, - not unfrequently our hero himself.

And now, gentle reader,- for as such I feel myself bound by all the rules of modern authorship to address you, although, for aught I know to the contrary, you may be the veriest literary Turk or Tatar that ever clapped the drag-chain of criticism round the neck of an unfortunate scribbler, and now, gentle reader, did you ever happen to pass through Oxford during the week immediately preceding Trinity Monday? did you ever chance on any of these days to wend your way into Trinity College, and cast your eyes through the large arched windows of the Hall upon the motley group of candidates for scholarship therein assembled ? If so, the probability is that you beheld a remarkably edifying sight,-boys from various schools without tails,-men from various colleges (metaphorically) without heads,-tough papers presented to them in the morning,-tender sandwiches and port wine at noon,-all, in short, combining to make a very interesting spectacle to the looker on, but a rather nervous reality to the more immediate actors in the ceremony.

And if, moreover, gentle reader, in addition to these multifa rious hypotheses which I have already advanced, it so happened that the date of such visit to the Hall of Trinity was the same as that which I have selected for my story,-among the various faces which the request for an extensive poem upon an undiscovered people, or two foolscap sheets of an essay upon an nutranslatable thesis, or a paper of historical dates, in any one of which you feel an awful conviction that you can't be less than five hundred years wrong, had gifted for the occasion with a supernatural elongation, among these numerous faces, I say, you might have discerned the particular one belonging to the

hero of our tale.

"Well, Mr. Eden," said the college porter to him one day,

as he was sauntering up and down between the hours of examination, "well, I do hope you'll get our scholarship, sir. I think you will, I hope you will,-I'm sure you will."

“Oh, thank you!" said Eden; "it's all very well; but I'm afraid there are rather too many candidates for that; and

"That ain't nothing at all, Mr. Eden, that ain't," said the porter. "Why, sir, when I stood for the portership, there were five-and-twenty stood against me. I was the youngest man of the lot. Everybody said Wiggins of Broad-street would get it. He didn't. I did. So you see numbers ain't nothing to do with it, sir."

The day for the viva voce part of the examination arrived. One by one, the candidates were summoned out of the Hall, and into the presence of an awful conclave, consisting of the President and Fellows of the college. At last Eden heard his name called; and feeling considerably more nervous than he had ever felt in his life before, he summoned up resolution, and started to face what he then considered his tormentors. At the door, which was ajar, he paused for fresh breath and courage. They were talking inside.

"The ignorance of those public-school boys in Divinity is shameful," he distinctly heard the Dean say.

The Bursar acquiesced.

"This boy Farley states in his papers," resumed the Dean, "that Predestination is the thief of Time. What can he mean ?”

"Mistakes it for Procrastination," said the Vice-President, "I suppose. Nearly as good as what the Northamptonshire sportsman said of the Predestinarians,—that they always headed the fox."

"Meaning Pedestrians, eh?" said the President. "Not bad at all."

un

A general laugh followed. Eden felt, at least, that he had not been guilty of any such gross errors as this, and presented himself without more delay, construed one passage from Claudian, and another from some Greek author-name known was bowed out, - spent the intervening day in an agony of hopes and fears, wrote home to say he had no chance whatever, and on the Monday morning, to his utter astonishment, was summoned into the Chapel to be elected a scholar of Trinity College.

"And now, Mr. Eden," said the Dean to him as soon as the

ceremony of installation was over, "and now that you are a Trinity Scholar, I have to beg that the next time you think proper to get up any pugilistic exhibitions with your friend Mr. Richardson Lane, that you will confine yourself and your cestuses, or boxing-gloves-or whatever you call them to your own room; and not make such a public display as I saw you

doing the other day. Would you believe it, Mr. Vice-President?-there they were-just before the garden gates-with a crowd of low illiterate people staring outside-working away all the time like two windmills with bloody noses- - bloody noses, sin, as true as I'm a living Dean. Never was such a thing-in these times too-incendiarism-and riots-and what not going on; one would have thought the force of example alone why, that very nose of yours was enough to breed a Town and Gown row, Mr. Eden."

The Dean paused for want of breath, the Vice-President, who was a good-natured man, and a bit of a wit, agreed that such public exhibitions mill-itated against all college discipline; and, after a few expressions of retrospective contrition and prospective amendment, the new scholar was left at liberty to make an epistolary report of this little epoch in his college career and prospects, to the about-to-be-delighted and parental inhabitants of Riversleigh.

Not long after our hero's installation as a Trinity Scholar, "A light broke in upon the gloom"

of the imprisoned "Brothers," in the shape of a letter from their deposed president. Its address was to Richardson Lane, Esq.; its contents were as follows:

“MY DEAR LANB,

Henley.

"I sit down, according to promise, to give a slight sketch of my proceedings since I left you.

"Of my journey to town, I confess that I have but a faint and indistinct recollection. I think that my head manifested an unusual desire to form an alternate acquaintance with the coachman's shoulder and its mother earth, during the night; and I can positively swear to informing that worthy that it was an exceedingly cold morning on being woke; which I was by a dustman (whose wheel we had just shaved,') calling out that our leaders had dropped their tails. The impromptu answer which I gave him I am afraid I have also forgotten; but you may judge of its force and pith by the dustman's rejoinder, which was expressive of a decided willingness to submit to the somewhat unnatural operation of "being blowed if that ere cove musn't have taken lodgings with a cabman the last time he was in town, and kept him up at nights on purpose for to learn his language." A quarter of an hour more saw me emerging from the vehicle of one of the identical class of men with whom the imaginative dustman had thus associated me, and making furious efforts to effect an entrance into my old quarters, the Colonnade Hotel, Charles Street, in the Haymarket; in which, in spite of the suggestion of a passing policeman, "that the hotel had gone to bed, and hadn't got up again yet," I at last succeeded; and, the bedrooms being full, was ushered into a bath-room-peeled-fell asleep in the water and dreamt I was turned into a bathing-machine, for two hours,-after which, the household being on the stir, I proceeded to the coffee-room, and ordered breakfast,

"I confess I like the Colonnade; it is such a central place for