intended to remind you of little PETER SHEEF, and of his adventures.

[Illustration]

PETER and I were freshmen together at Cambridge in the remote past
before "Johnnies," and "Chappies," and "Mashers" had been heard of,
before the "oof bird" had been fledged in its pink and sporting nest,
or the Egyptian cigarette had asserted its universal sway. I daresay
we differed but little (by "we" I mean the freshmen of our year) from
those who have lately appeared for the first time in King's Parade, or
Jesus Lane. We were very young--we imagined Proctors to be destitute
of human feeling; we ate portentous breakfasts of many courses, and,
for the most part, treated our allowances as though they had been so
much pocket-money. Also we had an idea that a man who had passed his
thirtieth year was absurdly old, and that nobody could be called a
boy whose name had been entered on the books of a College. In fact,
we were freshmen.

PETER and I were a good deal thrown together during our first term.
Like me, he had come up from one of the smaller schools, and we had
not, therefore, a very large number of friends to start with. PETER
was one of the pleasantest fellows in the world, always cheerful,
good-tempered, and obliging. He always seemed to have plenty of money.
Indeed, I know that his father made him an allowance of £800 a year,
a sum which was considerably more than double that received by the
majority of his fellows. The parental SHEEF I have since discovered
was a Solicitor, who had made his mark and his fortune by the crafty
defence of shady financiers in distress, of bogus company promoters,
and generally of the great race who live in the narrow border-land
which divides the merely disreputable from the positively indictable.