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 of study and reading, which was enlarged from time to time, it cannot be strictly said that this course was prescribed, for nothing was exacted.” Lectures began at eleven and ended at one, Saturday being dies non. Usually the same professor occupied the chair for both hours, changing his subject at noon. Between the two lectures there was an intermission of fifteen minutes. It was considered the proper thing to spend this interval in a visit to Lyons’s beer-cellar across the street, and drink a glass of half-and-half; result—a general somnolence during the succeeding hour.

Of the lectures themselves there were two characteristics that differentiated them sharply from their modern equivalents—a charming tendency, especially in the reign of Story, to wander from the subject into fields of reminiscence and general theory as pleasant and almost as instructive, and the fact that everything was based on textbooks. But these latter were often lost sight of and overlaid with a colloquial expanding of general rules, questions on (hypothetical or actual) parallel cases, queries from the students, and expressions of opinion, which must have produced a total effect surprisingly like a lecture of to-day. Thus Professor Joel Parker gives a lively account of his first experience in the classroom: