lay quiet till the throng of pursuers had rushed past, when he gently strolled towards College, and opportunely meeting with a well-known barrister who was taking his evening’s walk, he got him to give him a lift over the wall of Warden’s garden, and was safe. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XII. THE JUNIOR ON LEAVE OUT. Saints’ Days—Early Leave Out—Poaching—Rowing—A Dinner—Sunday Leave Out. Thoroughly to realise the merits of the holy men of old, one should have been at a public school; nobody ever welcomed the recurrence of their anniversaries with more sincere joy than a Junior at Winchester, always supposing that he had friends in the town or neighbourhood who would invite him to visit them on such occasions, otherwise the advantages, as hinted at above, were more than doubtful. If invited by friends in the neighbourhood, we were allowed “Early leave out,” _i.e._, from immediately after morning chapel; or if by friends in the town, from one o’clock; in both cases we had to be back for evening chapel, at a quarter before nine. I was fortunate enough to have hospitable friends, and a Saint’s-day seldom failed to be a day of rejoicing to me. If we had early leave out we used generally to hire a “four-wheeler” from Watt’s of the Blue Boar, and gallop out to our destination, arriving probably before the family were up; and the breakfasts we used to devour on these occasions must have caused our kind entertainers to rejoice that Saints’ days did not occur every day of the week. We frequently spent our days in fishing or shooting, according to the season of the year, varied with skating, boating, rifle practice in a chalk pit, &c., &c. Our shooting expeditions were generally undertaken without leave from any proprietor, but I have not much on my conscience as regards the amount of our depredations. The best bag that we ever made was, to the best of my recollection, one hare, two rats, a swallow, and fifteen larks. On that memorable day we quietly walked into a preserve four abreast, and blazed away, without doing the least harm, (except to one most unfortunate hare, that would sit still,) until a keeper appeared. I immediately bolted, shouting to my companions to separate and do the same; instead of doing so, however, they followed me in Indian file, and we were ultimately run to ground in a chalk pit. Our pursuer had no roof to his mouth; and between that, recent beer, rage, and exhaustion from the pace he had come, his speech was perhaps slightly incoherent. I offered him a cigar, but he was not amenable to reason, and we ultimately left him in the chalk pit gnashing his teeth.