'With the compliments of a collegian taking leave.' He received the gifts as tributes, from admirers, to a public character.
By this time the collegian would be up with him, and he would paternally add,'What have you forgotten?
'I forgot to leave this,' the collegian would usually return, 'for the Father of the Marshalsea.'
In the fulness of time, this correspondence showing signs of wearing out, and seeming to require an effort on the part of the correspondents to which in the hurried circumstances of departure many of them might not be equal, he established the custom of attending collegians of a certain standing, to the gate, and taking leave of them there.
'My good sir,' he would rejoin, 'he is infinitely obliged to you.' But, to the last, the irresolute hand of old would remain in the pocket into which he had slipped the money during two or three turns about the yard, lest the transaction should be too conspicuous to the general body of collegians.
One afternoon he had been doing the honours of the place to a rather large party of collegians, who happened to be going out, when, as he was coming back, he encountered one from the poor side who had been taken in execution for a small sum a week before, had
The collegians, assembled in Symposium in the Snuggery that night, marvelled what had happened to their Father; he walked so late in the shadows of the yard, and seemed so downcast.
He saw him in his mind's eye, a
collegian, a Parliament man, a Baronet, perhaps.
Like a mob of young
collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard.
Three men--devilish gentlemanly fellows--have been asking after you downstairs, and knocking at every door on the hall flight; for which they've been most infernally blown up by the
collegians that had the trouble of opening 'em.'
I only hope he won't overwork and get sick, as so many boys do," said simple Polly, with such a respectful belief in the eager thirst for knowledge of
collegians as a class, that Tom regarded the deluded girl with a smile of lofty pity, from the heights of his vast and varied experience.