The Brass Rule

Scholar's Reach climbs broad and busy from the assay courts of Cambridge up to the students' gate, past instrument lofts, workshops and lecture rooms, and the students of the Schola keep to two public houses upon it and drink in no others in the town. The Brass Rule is the second of the pair, plainer and quieter than the White Compass up the street, and Landlord Henry Wakelin keeps it. Its sign is a measuring rule picked out in brass, polished, so the students claim, by every entrant who has ever touched it for luck on his way to an examination.

What gives the house its importance is the post beside its door, for that is where the Schola's examination lists are pinned. On the mornings they go up the street fills with entrants, anxious fathers and the cook-shop keepers whose slate credit ends that same day, and the taproom fills directly after. A pass is drunk inside at Wakelin's tables; a failure is generally carried off to be drunk somewhere less public.

Last summer the lists brought the house a scandal. The son of an alderman, who had failed his second-year examination, was found named among those who had passed. The name was struck off before evening, and soon afterwards a clerk of the lists took the coach for London. Nobody has said in so many words that the father paid anyone, but the whole Reach has remarked how many dinners the young man has stood since, and that he has had no invitation from the Senior Alderman. Should a payment ever be proved, the father would forfeit his gown and the clerk would go to gaol, and the regulars of the Brass Rule have been reading the lists by the door rather more carefully ever since.