t.

[27] #At large#: free from restraint.

OFF.

"Robinson's coach will be down the road in a minute; it has gone up to
Bird's to pick up--we'll wait till they're close, and make a race of
it," says the leader. "Now, boys, half a sovereign apiece if you beat
'em into Dunchurch by one hundred yards."

"All right, sir," shouted the grinning post-boys. Down comes
Robinson's coach in a minute or two with a rival cornopean, and away
go the two vehicles, horses galloping, boys cheering, horns playing
loud. There is a special Providence over schoolboys as well as
sailors, or they must have upset twenty times in the first five miles,
sometimes actually abreast of one another, and the boys on the roofs
exchanging volleys of peas, now nearly running over a post-chaise
which had started before them, now half-way up a bank, now with a
wheel-and-a-half over a yawning ditch; and all this in a dark morning,
with nothing but their own lamps to guide them. However, it is all
over at last, and they have run over nothing but an old pig in Southam
Street; the last peas are distributed in the Corn Market[28] at
Oxford, where they arrive between eleven and twelve, and sit down to
a sumptuous breakfast at the Angel, which they are made to pay for
accordingly. Here the party breaks up, all going now different ways:
and Tom orders out a chaise and pair as grand as a lord, though he has
scarcely five shillings left in his pocket, and more than twenty miles
to get home.

[28] #Corn Market#: one of the principal streets of Oxford.

DULCE DOMUM.

"Where to, sir?"

"Red Lion, Farringdon," says Tom, giving ostler a shilling.

"All right, sir. Red Lion, Jem," to the post-boy, and Tom rattles away
toward home. At Farringdon, being known to the innkeeper, he gets that
worthy to pay for the Oxford horses, and forward him in another chaise
at once; and so the gorgeous young gentleman arrives at the paternal
mansion, and Squire Brown looks rather blue at having to pay two
pounds ten shillings for the posting expenses from Oxford. But the
boy's intense joy at getting home, and the wonderful health he is in,
and the good character he brings, and the brave stories he tells of
Rugby, its doings and delights, soon mollify the Squire, and three
happier people didn't sit down to dinner that day in England (it
is the boy's first dinner at six o'clock at home, great promotion
already), than the Squire and his wife and Tom Brown, at the end o