He slept at lectures, he slept in hall, he slept as he waited his turn to
go to the wicket in a cricket match, and he invariably went to sleep
afterwards. He even did so on the day he had made the biggest score, in
the biggest game ever played between his college and the pick of the
country; but he first gorged himself with cake and tea. The day he took
his degree he had to be dragged from a huge grandfather's chair, and
forced along in his ragged gown--"ten holes and twelve tatters"--to the
function in the convocation hall. He looked so fat and shiny, so balmy
and sleepy when he took his degree and was handed his prize for a poem on
Sir John Franklin, that the public laughed, and the college men in the
gallery began singing:
"Bye O, my baby,
Father will come to you soo-oon!"
He seemed not to care, but yawned in his hand as he put his prize book
under his arm through one of the holes in his gown, and in two minutes
was back in his room, and in another five was fast asleep.
It was the general opinion that William Rufus Holly, fat, yellow-haired,
and twenty-four years old, was doomed to failure in life, in spite of the
fact that he had a little income of a thousand dollars a year, and had
made a century in an important game of cricket.
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