In a room in the Great Quadrangle of the College of Holy Bottle some dozen of us sat. It was after “hall” (that is to say dinner), and we were “wining” (another uncouth University expression), with my friend Allen. Undergraduates all of us, and all members of the aforesaid college, which I have chosen to call (stealing from “Rabelais”) by the name “Holy Bottle.” I am not going to describe a wine-party, or to indulge in boyish slang. In the first place, we were not freshmen; and that queer verb “to wine” expresses, when the agents have overpassed the freshman-stage, no extraordinary or unreasonable process: port, and sherry and claret, with a few dry biscuits—a jar of tobacco and a box of tolerable cigars—only these and nothing more. When the delights of too much wine and a surfeit of sweets have been proved to be no longer surreptitious, they soon lose their attractions. In the second place, I write from memory of a distant period; and if slang was talked on that evening, it would be slang which has now ceased to be current. How soon those choice flowers of speech die away! The very titles of the utterers of those flash notes change every few years—Maccaronies, bloods, bucks, dandies, fast men. I do not remember what women were the toasts, or what horses were the favourites, or where the hounds used to meet; or, if I do, all is changed since then. The women are no longer fair; the horses, if any survive, are
