them that they would not make a particularly creditable display in hall that evening, and therefore they partook, instead, of a sumptuous repast in the rooms of Lord Fitzurse, who made up for the dirt which they had been eating by the splendour of his entertainment.

"I'll be even yet with that fellow Home," muttered Brogten, as they were parting.

"He's not w-w-worth it," said the host. one of the g-g-ghouls; eh, Bruce-ha! ha ha!"

"He's

CHAPTER THE TENTH.

CONTRASTS.

"And here was Labour his own bond slave; Hope
That never set the pains against the prize;
Idleness halting with his weary clog,

And poor misguided Shame and witless Fear
And simple Pleasure foraging for Death."

WORDSWORTH. The Prelude.

ALTHOUGH Julian did not immediately feel, and had no particular reason to dread, the results of Brogten's displeasure, yet it was very annoying to be on the same staircase with him. It was a constant reminder that there was one person, and he near at hand, who regarded him as an enemy. For a time, indeed, Brogten tried a few practical jokes on his neighbour and quondam school-fellow, which gratified for the moment his desire for revenge. Thus he would empty the little jug of milk which stood every day before Julian's door into the great earthenware pitcher of water which was usually to be found in the same position; or he would make a surreptitious entry into his rooms, and amuse himself by upturning chairs and tables, turning pictures

H

with their faces to the wall, and doing sometimes conderable damage and mischief. Once Julian, on preparing to get into bed, found a neat little garden laid out for his reception, between the sheets-flower-beds and gravel walks, all complete. This course of petty unnoyance he bore, though not without a great strugglo, in dignified and contemptuous silence. He looked Brogten firmly in the face, whenever they chanced to meet, and never gave him the triumph of perceiving that his small arts of vexation had taken the slightest effect. He merely smiled when the hot-headed Kennedy suggested retaliation, and would not allow Lillyston to try the effect of remonstrance. It was not long before Brogten became thoroughly ashamed that his malice should be tried and despised, and he would have proceeded to more overt acts of hatred had he not been one day informed by Lillyston that the Hartonians generally had heard of his proceedings, and that if he continued them he would be universally cut. For, indeed, such practical jokes as Brogten attempted are now almost unknown at Camford, and every man's room is considered sacred in his absence. But although he desisted from this kind of malice, it was not long before Brogten was generally shunned by his former schoolfellows. He developed into such a thorough blackguard that, had it not been for his merits as an varsman and a cricketer, even the countenance of Bruce and Lord Fitzurse would have been insufficient to prevent nim from being deserted by all the undergraduates of St. Werner's, except that small and wretched class

LILLYSTON AND BROGTEN.

115

who take refuge from vacuity in the society of cads, dog-fanciers, and grooms.

Yet Brogten's Harton education, idle as he had been, sufficed to make him see that he was sinking lower and lower, not only in the world's estimation, but in his own. Unable to make the mental effort which the least approach to study would have required, he suffered his few intellectual faculties to grow more and more gross and stolid, and spent his mornings in smoking, drinking beer, or lounging in the rooms of some one as idle and discontented as himself. It was sad to see the change which even in his first term came over his face; it was not the change from boyhood to youth which gave a manlier outline to Julian's features, but it was a look in which effrontery supplied the place of self-dependence, and coarseness was the substitute for strength. Beer in the morning, and brandy in the evening, cards, and low company, and vice, made him sink into a degradation from which he was only redeemed by the still lingering ambition to excel in athletic sports, and by the manly exercises which rescued him for a time from such dissipation as would have incapacitated him from shining in the boat or in the field.

Lillyston was a singular contrast with Brogten ; originally they were about equal in ability, position, and strength. They had entered school in the same form, and, until Julian came, they had generally been placed near each other in the quarterly examinations. Both of them were strong and active, and without being clever or brilliant, they were both possessed of respectable

powers of mind. Both of them had been in the Harton eleven, and now each of them was already in the second boat of their respective clubs; but with all these similarities Lillyston was beginning to be one of the men most liked and respected among all the best sets of his own year, and was reading for honours with a fair chance of ultimate success, while Brogten was looked on as a low and stupid fellow, whose company was discreditable, and whose doings were a disgrace to his old school.

The two presented much the same contrast as was also visible between Julian and Bruce. While Julian and Lillyston had mutually influenced each other for good, while they had been growing up together in warm and honourable friendship, thinking whatsoever things are pure and true and of good report, the other two had only fostered each other's vanity, and rather encouraged than checked each other's failings. At school they were always exchanging the grossest flattery, and the lessons and tendencies which each had derived from the other's society were lessons of weakness and sin alone. And now Bruce was looked on at St. Werner's as a vain, empty fellow, living on a reputation for cleverness which he had never justified,-low, dressy, and extravagant, despised by the reading men (whose society he affected to avoid) for his weakness and want of resolution; by the real athletes for his deficiency in strength and pluck, and by the aristocrats (whose rooms he most frequented) for the ill-concealed obscurity of his father's origin, and the ill-understood sources of his wealth. Since he first astonished the men of his year by the