hings never were let out at two guineas a-day:
then a fishmonger, whose wide front, but a week before, teemed with
such quantity and quality, as spoke audibly to every passer-by of
bursary dinners and passing suppers, was now soliciting a customer to
take his choice of three lank cod-fish, ticketed at so much per lb.
Billiard-rooms were silent, save where a solitary marker practised
impossible strokes: print-shops exhibited a dull uniformity of stale
engravings; and the innumerable horde of mongrel puppies of all
varieties, that, particularly towards the end of term, are dragged
about three or four in a string, and recommended as real Blenheims,
genuine King Charles's, or "one of old Webb's black and tan, real good
uns for rats"--had disappeared from public life, to come out again,
possibly, as Oxford sausages.

In this kind of way the three first weeks of the vacation passed over
without any very notable occurences. We were quiet enough in
college--there is no fun in two men kicking up a row for the amusement
of each other; even in the eye of the law three are required to
constitute a riot; so, on the strength of our good characters, albeit
somewhat recent of acquisition, we dined two or three times with the
fellows who were still in residence, and who, to do them justice, sank
a point or so from the usual stiffness of the common room, and made
our evenings agreeable enough. We certainly flattered ourselves, that
if they found us in turbot and champagne, we contributed at least our
share to the more intellectual part of the entertainment; we kept
within due bounds, of course, and never overstepped that respect which
young men are usually the more willing to pay to age and station the
less rigidly it is exacted; but we made the old oak pannels ring with
such hearty laughter as they seldom heard; and the pictures of
founders and benefactors might have longed to come down from their
frames to welcome even the shadow of those good old times when sound
learning and hearty good fellowship were not, as now, hereditary
enemies in Oxford. If my graver companions, from the calm dignity of
collegiate office, deign to look back upon the evenings thus spent
with two undergraduates in a Christmas vacation, when, unbending from
the formal and conventional dulness of term and its duties, they
interchanged with us anecdote and jest, and mingled with the sparkling
imaginations of youth the reminiscences of riper years--I am sure they
w