We attended the lectures in the University, we
distinguished ourselves no more than Murray would have approved of,
and many of us have remained united by friendship through half a
lifetime.
It was a pleasant existence, and the perfume of buds and flowers in
the old gardens, hard by those where John Knox sat and talked with
James Melville and our other predecessors at St. Leonard's, is
fragrant in our memories. It was pleasant, but St. Leonard's Hall
has ceased to be, and the life there was not the life of the free
and hardy bunk-dwellers. Whoso pined for such dissipated pleasures
as the chill and dark streets of St. Andrews offer to the gay and
rousing blade, was not encouraged. We were very strictly `gated,'
though the whole society once got out of window, and, by way of
protest, made a moonlight march into the country. We attended
`gaudeamuses' and solatia--University suppers--but little; indeed,
he who writes does not remember any such diversions of boys who beat
the floor, and break the glass. To plant the standard of cricket in
the remoter gardens of our country, in a region devastated by golf,
was our ambition, and here we had no assistance at all from the
University.
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