g but myself? Older and wiser!--oh yes!--youthful
friendship is very foolish in such matters.

But I suppose I must put up, as I best may, with the accumulating weight
of years and wisdom. It won't do to give up one's degree, and begin
again at the university, even if they leave us a university worth going
to. At all events, one could not go back and find there those "old
familiar faces" that made it what it was; and it is more pleasant to
look upon it all--the place and its old occupants--as still existing in
some dream-land or other, than to return to find an old acquaintance in
every stick and stone, while every human face and voice is strange to
us.

Yet one does meet friends in old scenes, sometimes, when the meeting is
as unexpected as delightful. And just so, in my last visit to Oxford,
did I stumble upon Horace Leicester. We met in the quadrangle where we
had parted some six years back, just as we might if we had supped
together the night before; whereas we had been all the time hundreds of
miles asunder: and we met as unrestrainedly, only far more cordially.
Neither of us had much time to spare in Oxford, but we dined together of
course; talked over old friends, and told old stories. As to the first,
it was strange enough to moralize upon the after-fortunes of some of our
contemporaries. One--of whom, for habitual absence from lectures, and
other misdemeanours many and various, the tutors had prophesied all
manner of evil, and who had been dismissed by the Principal at his final
leave-taking, with the remark that he was the luckiest man he had ever
known, inasmuch as having been perseveringly idle without being plucked,
and mixed up in every row without being rusticated--was now working hard
day and night as a barrister, engaged as a junior on committee business
the whole Session, and never taking a holiday except on the Derby day.
The ugliest little rascal of our acquaintance, and as stupid as a post,
was married to a pretty girl with a fortune of thirty thousand. Another,
and one of the best of us--Charley White--who united the business habits
of a man with the frolic of a schoolboy, and who ought to have been
added to the roll of the College benefactors, as having been the founder
of the Cricket and the Whist Club, and restored to its old place on the
river, at much cost and pains, the boat which had been withdrawn for the
last five years, and reduced the sundry desultory idlenesses of the
under-graduates i