some occasional champion ball game, when furniture smashes itself, and benches and fences get themselves burned up, of their own accord! But it was the annual, formal, pretended search, at midnight, with torches, by the students, for their tutelary bird, a mallard duck, which, according to tradition, sprang out of a drain when the first stone of the original college building was laid.
They hunted for their duck in this distempered manner, it is said, for three or four hundred years; and one irreverent historian of Oxford, who was rash enough to insinuate that this highly honored bird was not a huge and classic drake, but a middle-sized, common, barn-yard goose, was pelted with pamphlets by all All Souls for his pains.
Many and various are the titles given in Oxford to the Rulers of the Colleges. The Warden of All Souls, for instance, would be the Master of Balliol, the Dean of Christ Church, the Provost of Oriel, the President of Trinity, the Rector of Lincoln, and the Principal of Jesus. And if one of the American College Presidents had been—and, happily for the Americans, he is not—the Rector of Brazenose, the Warden of Wadham, or the Provost of Queen's, the perplexed citizens of the United States would be guilty of a gross breach of social collegiate etiquette if they addressed him as "Mr. President."
