CHAPTER V.
MR. VERDANT GREEN MATRICULATES, AND MAKES A SENSATION.
AS they went out at the gate, they inquired of the porter for Mr. Charles Larkyns, but they found that he had not yet returned from the friend's house where he had been during the vacation; whereupon Mr. Green said that they would go and look at the Oxford lions, so that he might be able to answer any of the questions that should be put to him on his return.
They soon found a guide, one of those wonderful people to which show-places give birth, and of whom Oxford can boast a very goodly average; and under this gentleman's guidance Mr. Verdant Green made his first acquaintance with the fair outside of his Alma Mater.
The short, thick stick of the guide served to direct attention to the various objects he enumerated in his rapid career: "This here's Christ Church College," he said, as he trotted them down St Aldate's, "built by Card'nal Hoolsy four underd feet long and the famous Tom Tower as tolls wun underd and wun hevery night that being the number of stoodents on the foundation;" and thus the guide went on, perfectly independent of the artificial trammels of punctuation, and not particular whether his hearers understood him or not: that was not his business. And as it was that gentleman's boast that he "could do the alls, collidges, and principal hedifices in a nour and a naff," it could not be expected but that Mr. Green should take back to Warwickshire otherwise than a slightly confused impression of Oxford.
When he unrolled that rich panorama before his "mind's eye," all its component parts were strangely out of place. The rich spire of St. Mary's claimed acquaintance with her poorer sister at the cathedral.
