Lines 376-377:  was said in English Litt to be

This is replaced in the draft by the more significant—and more tuneful—variant:

the Head of our Department deemed

Although it may be taken to refer to the man (whoever he was) who occupied this post at the time Hazel Shade was a student, the reader cannot be blamed for applying it to Paul H., Jr., the fine administrator and inept scholar who since 1957 headed the English Department of Wordsmith College.  We met now and then (see Forward and note to line 894) but not often.  The Head of the Department to which I belonged was Prof. Nattochdag—“Netochka” as we called the dear man.  Certainly the migraines that have lately tormented me to such a degree that I once had to leave in the midst of a concert at which I happened to be sitting beside Paul H., Jr., should not have been a stranger’s business.  They apparently were, very much so.  He kept his eye on me, and immediately upon John Shade’s demise circulated a mimeographed letter that began:

Several members of the Department of English are painfully concerned over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript poem, left by the late John Shade.  The manuscript fell into the hands of a person who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it, belonging as he does to another department, but is known to have a deranged mind.  One wonders whether some legal action, etc.

“Legal action,” of course, might be taken by somebody else too.  But no matter; one’s just anger is mitigated by the satisfaction of foreknowing that the engagé gentleman will be less worried about the fate of my friend’s poem after reading the passage commented here.  Southey liked a roasted rat for supper—which is especially comic in view of the rats that devoured his bishop.