248 THE TKINITY FOOT BEAGLES 



held out that perhaps a little scholarship might be found. If, how- 

 ever, the candidate's legs looked unsatisfactory, he would say, " I 

 see you wear tight twowsers" (the emblem in those days of pronounced 

 horsiness). " I think you'd better go to Magdalene ! " — of course, the 

 Magdalene of the high and far-off days of " Mother " Hunt. 



To return, however, to the convivial habits of beaglers. The 

 records go back behind even those days to the times of the Merton 

 Arms rdgime. That, remember, was in days when after dinner 

 wining was as inevital)le as dinner itself, and when dons, at least 

 other than such youthful innovators as Dr. Henry Jackson, still 

 wore tall hats.^ There was no formal beaglers' wine club, but 

 H. Cavan Irving tells us that the then Master, Valentine Whitby 

 Vickers, " was great on nuts, and often after Hall they came to my 

 rooms, which were quite near the Dining Hall at Trinity, and when 

 most of us were drowsy and half-asleep, Vickers would call out, ' I 

 say, Mister, have you any more nuts ? And the port is nearly done.' " 

 This homely tale belongs to a simpler time, before such affectations 

 as the " sinful life " were invented, when men dined from a joint and 

 drank solemnly of vintage wines afterwards. When such men made 

 a FEAST in those days, the fare was the same ; but special pains were 

 taken that the saddle should come from a four-year-old down-fed 

 wether, and the wine was such as the host, or his father before him, 

 had nurtured from its youth up in his own cellars. Those men 

 were epicures in their own way, and are perfectly presented, with 

 the help of the late Mr. George Du Maurier, in a certain back 

 volume of Punch. Two gourmands, one fat and the other lean, are 

 sitting in a club and talking. 



Fio^st Gourmand. I say ! that was a beautiful saddle of mutton 

 Tom gave us last year. 



Second Gourmand. Yes ! I often wish I'd had another slice of 

 that saddle of mutton. 



The very plain dinner of very special quality was part of a 

 definite, and in its way excellent, system of self-indulgence, in which 

 the palate's capacity to discriminate vintages was not to be marred 



' There is still one habitual tall hat of Victorian pattern surviving, that of Mr. 

 Aldis Wright, Vice-Master of Trinity. 



