After four rugged years at Scotland's Gordonstoun School and two terms at the spartan Geelong School in the Australian bush, Britain's Prince Charles, 18, seems to be ready for more intensive book learning. Next fall the prince will enter Trinity College, Cambridge, the alma mater of his grandfather George VI, to read history and related subjects. After a couple of years of that contemplative life, the heir to the throne will sign up for a tour of duty in one of the realm's military services.

Portuguese President Americo Tomas shouted "Wolf! Wolf!" and blasted away at the beast in the bushes, only to discover that he had bagged one of General Francisco Franco's hunting dogs. Otherwise, the partridge shoot at the Spanish state hunting preserve near Ciudad Real went smoothly, if somewhat noisily, as Host Franco, looking tanned and robust, observed his 74th birthday. President Tomas apologized about the dog, but maybe someone should have apologized to the birds. The twelve guns in the party brought down 1,300 red partridges.

The skirt was hardly a mini, but it certainly was a bit more mod than the numbers Jacqueline Kennedy normally wears. Enshrined in fashion's Hall of Fame since January, Jackie sported the new hemline, three inches above the knee, at lunch in Manhattan with her sister, Princess Lee Radziwill. "It's the shortest we've seen her in," said Women's Wear Daily, whose photographer caught the girls in a gay mood as they emerged from the Lafayette Restaurant. One thing, though, that Jackie hasn't been especially happy about recently: The Pleasure of His Company, a warm, highly personal reminiscence of Jack Kennedy by Paul ("Red") Fay, a longtime family friend. In Dallas last week, Fay reported that Jackie had rejected his donation of $3,000 to the Kennedy Memorial Library at Harvard because she thought the gift "hypocritical." Said Fay: "She couldn't have found anything in the book that was unkind to Jack, but I believe she felt it was an invasion of privacy."

"Whenever we need women, I think we ought to draft them," declared General Lewis Hershey, 73, head of the nation's Selective Service System. "There's a real nurse shortage in the armed forces." Will the girls be getting Greetings? Not for the present, Hershey quickly assured a reporter for the University of Michigan's daily newspaper. At a national conference on the draft in Chicago, Anthropologist Margaret Mead, 65, supported Hershey's idea of coed conscription to make national service truly equal and universal. She drew the line, though, at letting the ladies be battleaxes. "I do not believe in using women in combat," she said, "because females are too fierce."

Originally, Inventor Alfred Nobel intended his prizes as encouragements for bright young scientists, writers and social visionaries, but it begins to seem that longevity is a criterion for winning. This year the laureates' average age is 73. As the traditional silver trumpets blared in Stockholm's Concert Hall, Sweden's King Gustav VI Adolf presented Nobel Prizes to Virologist Francis Peyton Rous, 87, of Manhattan's Rockefeller University, and Surgeon Charles B. Muggins, 65, of the University of Chicago, named to share the $60,000 award in physiology and medicine; the University of Chicago's Robert Mulliken, 70, honored in chemistry, and French Physicist Alfred Kastler, 64, collecting the physics prize for his studies of polarized light. Sharing the prize for literature were Israeli Novelist S. Y. Agnon, 78, and a local Stockholm girl: German-born Jewish Poet Nelly Sachs, 75.

If the rumor keeps bouncing around long enough, it may prove to be true. Right now, Mrs. Patrick Nugent, 19, just giggles and changes the subject when folks ask if she is pregnant.

On his way back to Washington from a Caribbean holiday, Vice President Hubert Humphrey stopped off in San Juan to call on Cellist Pablo Casals, 89. Sitting down at his piano, an instrument he mastered as a boy even before he owned a cello, Don Pablo remarked: "I played for President Roosevelt, you know." Humphrey was all set to launch into his own happy reminiscences of the New Deal when Casals added: "Yes, I played for him in 1904."

Practically everybody else has had a say on the matter, so why shouldn't Robert Oswald, 32, Lee Harvey's older brother? Robert, who works for the Acme Brick Co. in Wichita Falls, Texas, has decided to add his opinions to the expanding literature on the assassination and the Warren Report. "I feel the final conclusion that Lee was the lone assassin is correct," said he, but he still thinks there is need for a book "to shed light on Lee's overall character, which, in my opinion, was cut short in the commission report."

As the host's wife confided, "My husband has always enjoyed ships." Indeed, U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, 58, had a boatload of fun at his party for 250 U.N. diplomats aboard the liner Constitution, which he took over for an evening while the ship was docked in Manhattan. With the ship's owners, American Export Isbrandtsen Lines, picking up most of the tab, Goldberg cruised happily among his guests in the first-class lounge, later treated them to a first-class little supper that included Iranian caviar and supreme of pheasant. Gazing at the dock, Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Fedorenko remarked: "This is just like the U.N.--we do not feel we are moving any place."

Ill lay: Jack Ruby, 55, in serious condition at Dallas'Parkland Memorial Hospital after surgery to remove a cancerous lymph node from his chest; Britain's Queen Mother Elizabeth, 66, recovering in London's King Edward VIFs Hospital following an unspecified abdominal operation; Joseph P. Kennedy, 78, resting in Boston's New England Baptist Hospital after an operation to remove lesions from his chest; and Actress Sina Lollobrigida, 38, feeling much better following treatment in Manhattan's Beth Israel Hospital for severe intestinal inflammation that resulted, she said, from eating an unwashed apple in Mexico.

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