A week afterwards I met my talented and enthusiastic friend crawling to absence through the playing-fields, as tired as a posthorse, and as hot as a salamander, with many applauding associates on his right and on his left, who exhibited to him certain pencilled scrawls, on which he gazed with flushed and feverish delight. He had kept his wicket up two hours, and made a score of seventy-three. “I may thank my bat for it,” quoth he, shouldering it as Hercules might have shouldered his club; “it is the best bat in the school!” Alas for the instability of human affections! The exquisite knot had been superseded. Mercandotti had been sold for half-price, and the Honourable Ernest Adolphus Volant was again to be eloquent, and again to be envied; he had still the best bat in the school. I believe I was a tolerably good-natured boy. I am sure I was always willing to acquiesce in the estimation my companions set upon their treasures, because they were generally such that I felt myself a vastly inadequate judge of their actual value. But the Honourable Ernest Adolphus Volant was exorbitant in the frequency and variety of his drafts upon my sympathy. He turned off five hockey-sticks in a fortnight; and each in its turn was unrivalled. He wore seven waistcoats in a week, and each for its brief day was as single in its beauty as the rainbow. In May, Milward’s shoes were unequalled; in June, Ingalton’s were divine. He lounged in Poet’s Walk over a duodecimo, and it was the sweetest edition that ever went into a waistcoat-pocket; he pored in his study over a folio, and there was no other copy extant but Lord Spencer’s and the mutilated one at Heidelberg. At Easter there were portraits hanging round his room; Titian never painted their equal. At Michaelmas, landscapes had occupied their place; Claude would have owned himself outdone. The colt they were breaking for him in Leicestershire, the detonator he had bespoken of Charles Moore, the fishing-rod which had come from Bermuda, the flageolet he had won at the raffle--they were all, for a short season, perfection; he had always “the best bat in the school.”