by no means pleased to see her acting as purveyor to
the gang which Harry had joined. He knew how such contact would
damage him in the eyes of all the parochial respectabilities, and
was anxious to do his best to get him clear of it.

With these views he went up to the men, who were resting under a
large elm tree, and complimented them on their day's work. They
were themselves well satisfied with it, and with one another.
When men have had sixteen hours or so hard mowing in company, and
none of them can say that the others have not done their fair
share, they are apt to respect one another more at the end of it.
It was Harry's first day with this gang, who were famous for
going about the neighbourhood, and doing great feats in hay and
wheat harvest. They were satisfied with him and he with them,
none the less so probably in his present frame of mind, because
they also were loose on the world, servants of no regular master.
It was a bad time to make his approaches, the constable saw; so,
after sitting by Harry until the gang rose to finish off their
work in the cool of the evening, and asking him to come round by
his cottage on his way home, which Harry promised to do, he
walked back to the village.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SCHOOLS.

There is no more characteristic spot in Oxford than the
quadrangle of the schools. Doubtless in the times when the
University held and exercised the privileges of infang-thief and
outfang-thief, and other such old-world rights, there must have
been a place somewhere within the liberties devoted to
examinations even more exciting than the great-go. But since
_alma mater_ has ceased to take cognizance of "treasons,
insurrections, felonies, and mayhem," it is here, in that fateful
and inexorable quadrangle, and the buildings which surround it,
that she exercises her most potent spells over the spirits of her
children. I suppose that a man being tried for his life must be
more uncomfortable than an undergraduate being examined for his
degree, and that to be hung--perhaps even to be pilloried--must
be worse than to be plucked. But after all, the feeling in both
cases must be essentially the same, only more intense in the
former; and an institution which can examine a man (_in literis
humanitoribus_, in humanities, so called) once a year for two or
three days at a time, has nothing to complain of, though it has
no longer the power of hanging him at once out of hand.

The schools' quadrangl