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For the previous week Mrs. Clowes and her assistants had been working night and day: her shop was in a stage of siege. Every boy, and every boy’s friend, seemed to have pocket-money to spend, and to want to spend it over her counter. Then it was the great wedding-day of the year, and the churchyard swarmed like a hive; from every one of the many public-houses round College and Church, music and mirth, clattering feet, and loud-voiced laughter issued. “The Apple Tree,” “The Pack Horse,” “The Ring o’ Bells,” “The Blackamoor’s Head,” were filled to repletion with wedding guests; whilst “The College Inn,” and the old “Sun Inn,” held a less boisterous quota of the Collegians’ friends and relatives.

On those wet days when outdoor play was impossible, the boys, besides darning their stockings, occupied their spare hours in carving spoons and apple-scrapers out of bone, in working balls and pincushions with coloured worsted in fanciful devices, and a stitch locally known as “colleging:” and with these, on Easter Monday and at Whitsuntide, they reaped a harvest of pocket-money, having liberty to offer them for sale. And when it is remembered that our notable female ancestors, poor and rich, wore indoors a pincushion and sheathed scissors suspended at their sides, it is not to be wondered that these found ready purchasers as memorials of the visit.