The monastic seclusion into which a college draws itself at night begins at ten o'clock, when the gates are closed. At midnight the porter goes to bed, and no one may enter without a previous late leave from the proper source, dean or tutor. This is granted grudgingly, and is apt to be refused. A man who asks for it repeatedly feels an official coolness gazing askance at him. And even for coming back between the hours of ten and twelve he is fined a few pence, the exact sum varying from college to college.

Thus, whether to save gate-money or to remain a blue-eyed boy with his college dean, many an undergraduate sooner or later finds himself looking for an inconspicuous mode of entry into college. Why pain the dean, he argues to himself; why rouse the porter from his snores? And forgetting all the good advice of his youth, the tyro becomes naughty, and studies the problem of climbing in.