[AN OXFORD FRESHMAN 21]

CHAPTER III.

MR. VERDANT GREEN LEAVES THE HOME OF HIS ANCESTORS.

THE time till Easter passed very quickly, for much had to be done in
it. Verdant read up most desperately for his matriculation,
associating that initiatory examination with the most dismal visions
of plucking, and other college tortures.

His mother was laying in for him a new stock of linen, sufficient in
quantity to provide him for years of emigration; while his father was
busying himself about the plate that it was requisite to take, buying
it bran-new, and of the most solid silver, and having it splendidly
engraved with the family crest, and the motto "Semper virens."

Infatuated Mr. Green! If you could have foreseen that those spoons
and forks would have soon passed, - by a mysterious system of loss
which undergraduate powers can never fathom, - into the property of
Mr. Robert Filcher, the excellent, though occasionally erratic, scout
of your beloved son, and from thence have melted, not "into thin
air," but into a residuum whose mass might be expressed by the
equivalent of coins of a thin and golden description, - if you could
but have foreseen this, then, infatuated but affectionate parent, you
would have been content to have let your son and heir represent the
ancestral wealth by mere electro-plate, albata, or any sham that