than ours at Rugby, and a much more solemn and sleepy sort of a place, with its gables and old mullioned windows. One side is occupied by the Hall and Chapel; the Principal's house takes up half another side, and the rest is divided into staircases, on each of which are six or eight sets of rooms inhabited by us undergraduates, with here and there a Tutor or Fellow dropped down amongst us, not exactly to keep order, but to act as a sort of ballast. . . . My rooms are what they call garrets, right up in the roof, with a commanding view of college tiles and chimney pots, and of houses at the back. No end of cats, both college Toms and strangers, haunt the neighborhood, and I am rapidly learning cat-talk from them."
This is a very fair picture of the Oriel of to-day. And a friend of Tom Brown's, of long years standing, talked cat-talk to the descendants of Tom Brown's College Toms on more than one sunny afternoon during the unusually sunny summer of 1899.
Mr. Hughes's rooms, as a freshman, are said to have been "on No. Five Staircase, Second Quadrangle, Three-pair Back"; but other and more accessible apartments of his were pointed out by the Hall-porter, to the old friend in question, during the pauses in the conversation with the cats.
In this same first letter to Arthur, Tom said:
