small
boys, with pea-shooters, and the cornopean player, got up behind; in
front the big boys, mostly smoking, not for pleasure, but because they
are now gentlemen at large--and this is the most correct public method
of notifying the fact.

"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 school-boys 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's 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 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.

"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
towards 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-pound
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