is pitched on one side of his head. No moustache of course: that was as rare an article under the presidency of Martin Von Buren as under the premiership of Lord Melbourne. His toilette is "got up to kill," as the slang phrase goes his broad shirt collar turns down over a black satin cravat; his frockcoat is dark-olive, with fancy silk but tons, and a velvet collar.

Bill's waistcoat is a wonderful affair: delicately blended shades of strawcolour, salmon-colour, and pearl-grey; he had it made last summer, when he was manager of the Commencement ball; the nine managers bought the whole piece of waistcoating, to appropriate it to themselves. His pantaloons (remember, we are in America for the nonce, and must talk American) are Frenchgrey; his feet, as small as a woman's, are cased in thin seal-skin boots, with very high heels; one of his hands which, if not quite so small as a woman's, are nearly as white-is carefully fitted into a pearl-coloured kid, the other is bare, probably to show a large embossed ring, the badge of one of his societies. Various other badges are plastered over his waistcoat and shirt-front.

After this detail, you may perhaps express your opinion, that Mr. Bedlow looks like a guy. Not improbably he Not improbably he does so to you. I can only say we used to think him a very handsome fellow, and no end of a swell. You may perhaps also think (I am aware he is open to criticism in many ways) that he has an effeminate look. And, when I complete the picture by making you observe that he is eating a paper of candy, positive sugar-candy, which he has just bought at the confectioner's behind him, you will be still more likely to think so. Nevertheless, before we have done with him, you will see that Bill is, to use a Western phrase, "some" in a row.

Bedlow was rather a college idol of mine. Why I worshipped him has sometimes puzzled me since; he was not so very clever or noble after all, and I believe has never done anything as a man to distinguish himself. But his

little knot of intimate friends swore by him, and generally he was one of the most popular and influential members of his class one of the best hated too, as popular men are apt to be.

Bill came up at the age of fifteen, a rosy lively lad from New York, where his father was a lawyer and politician (in America the terms are almost synonymous) of some position, and fair, though not large, fortune. He had undergone his preparatory studies at a pretty good private school, of which there were then, and still are, á large number in the Northern States. Thanks to this school, Bedlow was better off for Latin, especially Latin prosody, than most of the New Englanders; he naturally knew more about the elegances of city life; he was pretty well supplied with money or credit; so on the whole he began by rather despising the bulk of his fellow-students, and setting up for an aristocrat. Rather an odd way, you may say, of acquiring popularity; and, had Bedlow been a fool in other respects, or a weak, undecided character, he would doubtless have made sad shipwreck of his pretensions. But having a deal of "go" in him, and being quick enough to excel up to a certain point in anything he would take the trouble to apply himself to, he ended by causing his assumption of superiority to be on the whole acknowledged. His first success, however, was not exactly of a literary nature.

The undergraduate course at all American colleges occupies four years. The four divisions are not called "years," but "classes," and the lines between them are much more strictly drawn, as we shall have further occasion to see by and by, than between the men of different years in an English university. The second-year students are called sophomores; why, nobody knows. The popular explanation used to be, that the name was compounded of the two contradictory Greek words most resembling it in sound, and had originally been applied as a term of derision. But an erudite Yale professor found out by dint of vast research that the epithet was formerly written sophimore, a discovery for which

he took to himself great credit, and which greatly helped to elucidate the difficulty.1

These sophomores, or sophimores, or sophs (the usual abbreviation will serve to compromise the difference in orthography) have the traditional reputation of being the chief actors in such small amount of larking as goes on at Yale. Their particular speciality used to be hoaxing the freshmen. In all societies. of boys or young men everywhere it is customary to play tricks upon newcomers; but the American contrivances certainly went ahead of most European doings of the kind. Probably the nearest approach to them might be found in an Irish mess of the last generation. Some of the tricks were simply dishonest, such as chousing an unlucky freshman out of fifty cents or half a dollar under pretence of an "oil tax." Other diversions were, blowing up the hapless tyros with gunpowder, or making their rooms uninhabitable for a time by means of asafoetida. Another favourite sport was to gain surreptitious admission into a freshman's room and make an inverse ratio of all the contents, after the manner formerly in vogue among sprightly young officers. One of the most innocent amusements was "smoking a fresh." When it had been ascertained (by the Baconian process of offering him a weed) that a particular freshman did not smoke, half a dozen sophs would-with consequences which may be guessedcombine to initiate him.

But the pet joke was sham-tutoring. One of the oldest and gravest looking sophs, his dignity further enhanced by a pair of spectacles, green or otherwise, sent an accomplice to inform one of the freshmen that tutor (some imaginary name) wished to see him immediately. An invisible audience crammed the two bedrooms adjoining the sitting-room in which the soph received his supposed pupil, without asking him to take a

1 The "speaking and writing" mania begins its ravages in the second year. Hence sophomoric or sophomorical has come to be an American adjective to express anything even more bombastic and absurd than the usual style of forensic and congressional eloquence.

chair, but in other respects very politely, and proceeded to ask him all manner of questions about his parents, and family, and himself, what were his means and prospects, how many shirts he had-this was always a great point,-and the number of the poor fellow's under garments, five, six, or seven as the case might be, was carefully taken down as a subject for a future jest-in short, anything that was likely to afford occasion for "trotting him out."

Now in Bill's first term the sophs undertook to sham-tutor him, although he was by no means the usual kind of subject; a much older, much greener, and much poorer class was usually selected for this victimization. Perhaps they thought him so self-sufficient and overconvinced of his own sharpness that he might easily be taken in. If so, never were men more mistaken, for the freshman, after pretending to be duly awestruck at the awful presence into which he was ushered, began to answer the questions addressed to him in a way which soon showed that he was chaffing the sham-tutor. However, the pretended functionary went on with his interrogation, more because he did not know well how to get out of it than from a desire to continue a farce in which the tables were so turned upon himself, until it came to the subject of the inner vestments, when Bill, instead of a direct reply, innocently remarked, that he did not wonder at the faculty interesting themselves in the students' cleanliness; there certainly was great need of their interference; he had noticed a great many dirty shirts, particularly among the sophomores, whose linen struck him as extremely problematical. At this the concealed parties could hold out no longer, but rushed out from their closets in great wrath, and with loud cries of "Hustle him out!" ejected Bill into the entry. But when they had got him there, the freshman, though smaller than any of his assailants, made such use of his fists as to astonish one or two of them; not merely astonish, but incense them, and, the staircase-window being open (it was only a second floor), some

body proposed that they should throw him out of it, which was accordingly done forthwith. But Bedlow, who hadn't been used to that sort of thing at home, took care to pull out a sophomore along with him, that he might have something soft to fall upon. The soph fell undermost and broke his arm; the freshman got off with a few bruises. The affair was hushed up, and very few even of the students ever heard of it, but there buzzed around a mysterious rumour that Bedlow had somehow "served out" the sophs completely. They were always observed to give him a wide berth, and his own class began to regard him as a hero.

You will please not to infer from the above that American second-year men have a habit of throwing freshmen out of third-story windows. A set of youth less belligerent, less aggressive, less addicted to anything like breaches of the peace than the Yalensians were in my time, it would be hard to conceive, much more to find. A personal collision even with a "town-loafer" was of very rare occurrence, among themselves still rarer. Looking back to my own feelings and habits of mind as an undergraduate there, I am quite sure that nothing short of the direst extremity, such as peril of my own life or another's, could have forced me to lay hands on a comrade, and I am equally sure that the same might have been said of half, or more than half, the students. So far as one can reason back upon the subject, I impute this state of feeling to three causes. First (I affirm it in all sincerity), religious principle, a solemn conviction that it was unchristian to resort to personal violence, save when in obvious peril of life or limb. Secondly, a conviction nearly or quite as strong, that personal violence was ungentlemanly. Thirdly, a want of, not presence of mind exactly, but what you might almost call presence of body; a want of familiarity with dangerous positions and bodily struggles. Cowardice I do not admit as a constituting element. At the same time, I do admit that the conduct above described may be very easily misinterpreted

as the effect of cowardice (more's the pity!), and that the unfortunate results of such misinterpretation are now too plainly visible. The hot-headed Southerner, finding the people of the North not so ready as himself to resent a real or supposed insult with a blow, began at a very early period of our history to form his conception of them as wanting in courage. This idea gaining ground by repetition in each successive generation, the insolence of the slaveholders gained ground pari passu, till the abuse culminated in the present state of things, when Northern representatives are obliged to carry revolvers to Congress to protect themselves.

Bedlow, therefore, having founded his reputation as a wit and a hero at the same time, was able to rest on his laurels in the latter character; in the former he felt bound to do something more. Among the various rhetorical paces through which we were put, one of the earliest consisted in declaiming, or "speaking pieces," which we had to do to a great extent, once a week at least. A few of the students took a schoolboy pleasure in this, but the majority were much the reverse of delighted; even those fondest of hearing their own voices in debates of their own composition were bored at being obliged to rehearse the compositions of others; and still more bored to hear them rehearsed. Bedlow endeavoured to enliven the performance by selecting humorous extracts, such as Serjeant Buzfuz from "Pickwick" (which had just then appeared); but the professor of elocution, feeling the dignity of his lecture-room violated by the unseemly sound of laughter, forbade the young speaker to choose any more "comic speeches. Whereupon, Bill

swore that he would deliver a comic speech in spite of the professor. Next time, he selected a well-known bit of Irish eloquence: well-known, because it was one of the first in our freshman manual of extracts; a speech in an action for libel, stigmatizing the libeller as worse than the highway robber. "The man who plunders on the highway may have the semblance of an apology

for what he does. A loved wife may demand subsistence, a circle of helpless children may raise to him the supplicating hand for food. He may be driven to the act by the high mandate of imperative necessity," &c. &c. And a little farther on it is affirmed, that the libeller's victim, "if innocent, may look like Anaxagoras to the heavens, but must feel that the whole earth," &c. Such was the speech by Bill chosen ; but in reciting it, pretending to forget the words, he travestied it into utter nonsense. The professor did not quite comprehend him at first, for he began in a low tone, and had a Rachel or Robsonlike habit of dropping his voice at times, till almost inaudible; but, when the grave instructor did hear what was going on, he was horrified by the following:

"The man who blunders on the high

way may have the hindrance of an analogy for what he does. A snubbed wife may command resistance; a circle of yelping children may raise to him the suffocating hand for food. He may be driven to the act by the huge mammoth of impertinent necromancy."

The professor rubbed his ears and eyes, hardly daring to believe those organs. Meanwhile, Bedlow had gone down into one of his sotto voces, and the next words audible were

"If innocent, he may look, like an ox or an ass, to the heavens-" Here Bill's speech was brought to an untimely close, for the professor, in great wrath, ordered him down, and threatened to have him suspended. But the good luck which seemed to attend Bedlow in all his scrapes, got him off scotfree. To be continued.

I TRUST that some one who is capable of dealing with questions of Art, and who is not indifferent to the power which women may exert in raising or in corrupting it, will draw our attention to the Female School of Art and Design which has been opened at 37, Gower Street, and of which the following account is given in a paper lately issued by the Committee :

"1. This School, originally the female 'School of Design,' was established by Government at Somerset House in the year 1842-3, but, from want of accommodation, it was removed to adjacent premises in the Strand, and, for a similar reason, was afterwards transferred to Gower Street in February, 1852.

"2. Its object is twofold: I.-Partly to enable Young Women of the Middle Class to obtain an honourable and profitable employment; II-Partly to improve Ornamental Design in Manufactures by cultivating the taste of the Designer.

"3. Since 1852 six hundred and ninety Students have entered themselves at the School, and the number at the present time is one hundred and eighteen, of whom seventy-seven are studying with the view of ultimately maintaining themselves. Some of them, daughters of Clergymen and Medical Men, unexpectedly compelled, by a variety of causes, to gain their own livelihood, and even to support others besides themselves, have, through the instruction and assistance received here, obtained good appointments in Schools, or are enabled to live independently by means of private teaching. The present daily attendance averages seventy.

"4. The success of the School has been considerable. In the last three years, the students have taken an annual average of twenty Local, and three National Medals, and, at the last Annual Examination, six of them obtained Free Studentships. Six of them, moreover, gained their living for several years, by Designing and Painting Japanned Articles, in Wolverhampton; one was for several years a Designer in a Damask Manufactory in Scotland; another supports herself by Lithography; and three are employed in a Glass