After the short and sharp battle with the scarlet fever narrated above, the term went on very peacefully, but with a growing expectation that this would not be the last one in Wales. News from Uppingham of the unpreparedness of the place to receive us left little room for doubt, but the question was not decided (at least, officially) even at the date of the break-up. The prospect of a fresh period of makeshift life was not a welcome one; but the worst had been faced by this time, and found, after all, not hard to deal with. The long dark evenings of November proved a less difficulty than was anticipated. With afternoon school shifted to the hour of sunset, and with meetings of the Debating and other societies on half-holiday evenings, the dark hours did not hang heavily, and the expected tedium of an Arctic winter was not experienced. The term closed with a concert given in the Assembly Room at Aberystwith, December 13th, and another on the next night in the Temperance Hall at popular prices. On the 14th, a team of Old Boys played the usual football match against the Present School, and were beaten by two goals to one. That evening the class-list was read and the prizes given. If the boys hoped to gather from the Headmaster's speech an intimation of where they would meet him after Christmas they were disappointed. The government had as yet no communication to make. Next morning, in the darkness before dawn, the special train carried them to their homes, to await with curiosity their next marching orders.



CHAPTER XI.—LUDIBRIA MARIS.

Sit down, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.

"THE TEMPEST."

They said, "and why should this thing be? What danger lowers by land or sea? They ring the tune of Enderby."

JEAN INGELOW.

"England, when she goes to war," said a Prime Minister not long ago, "has not to consider whether she will be able to fight a second or a third campaign." We remembered that we were Englishmen; and on January 19th, 1877, went down again with a good courage for our third campaign on the Welsh coast. A furious gale was howling that day among the hills of Cardiganshire, recalling to the memory of some of us the stormy Ides of March, when the pioneers of our little army first set foot in Borth. Omina principiis inesse solent. This gale was sounding the key-note of the term's adventures.

The cause of our return to Borth for a third term is briefly told. We had gone home at Christmas, uncertain whether we should meet again there or at Uppingham. Dr. Acland, of Oxford, to whose active sympathy with the school in its perplexities we must at least gratefully allude, had undertaken on our behalf to inspect the sanitary condition of Uppingham, and give us his judgment on the expediency of reassembling there. His judgment was submitted to the attention of the Trustees at their meeting, on December 22nd, when it was resolved that, "In the face of Dr. Acland's report, the Trustees deeply regret they cannot at present recall the school to Uppingham." So we went back to the sea.

Our numbers this term just missed by one the normal total of three hundred. In the two preceding terms they had been smaller by some five or six. The camp at Borth, therefore, had not suffered from want of recruits. Indeed, it was now foreseen that the return to Uppingham would be for about one-third of the school a first arrival there.

The beginning of the end of our exile seemed to be marked by the reduced number of masters' families in camp. Some had gone into winter quarters at Aberystwith; some had already resettled at Uppingham. Our connection with home began to be retightened also by parochial and other common transactions, in which we took our share from a distance. Not, indeed, that the connection had ever been discontinued. We had left too precious pledges behind us. The deserted gardens did not waste all their sweetness on the air which we had exchanged for a "fresher clime." A thin intermittent stream of their products found its way along the nine hours of railway through most of the year. Flowers, fruit, and vegetables might raise tantalising memories of the pleasant places where they grew, but were not the less welcome to dwellers in this somewhat austere tract where they did not grow or grew very niggardly. The traffic in these delicacies drew the attention of the London and North- Western Railway Company, whose officials called to account one of our servants for travelling with an excess of personal luggage. The artless contrabandist, besides his own modest pack, had fourteen several hampers and boxes under his charge. This was checked. But who was the miscreant who systematically staved in and pounded into such odd shapes the little tin boxes in which our rose-fanciers had their choice blooms sent them by post? Post Office authorities thought the damage was caused by "the pressure of the letters." We did not, and remonstrated, till the practice, whoever was the criminal, was stopped. Besides these gracious souvenirs of home, there were from time to time business matters which we had to transact as parishioners and ratepayers. One was sensible of an almost humorous contrast, when we discussed our interests in the Midlands in a room overlooking the coast and hills of Cardiganshire, where one turned from watching the waves breaking crisply on the beach, to study a map of some property in Rutland pastures. It has been accounted a signal proof of Roman self-confidence, that bidders could be found for a piece of land on which Hannibal was encamped at the moment of sale. The situations are not quite parallel. But people who could seriously debate, as we did, on the purchase of a freehold at a time when not even their Rome was their own, clearly had not despaired of their country.

With the exception of the moving incidents to be immediately narrated, the tale of this term's life differs little from that of the preceding. The round of work and play was much the same; the harriers were out again, football went on as before, till superseded by the "athletics," and a match was played on March 7th against Shrewsbury School on their ground, of which the result was a drawn battle.

Our difficulties this term were with the elements. In novels of school life, where the scene is laid on the coast, the hero always imperils his bones in an escapade upon the cliffs. The heroes of our romance knew what was expected of them. Accordingly, two new boys of a week's standing start one afternoon for a ramble on Borth Head and are missing at tea-time. Search parties are organised at once (it was not the first occasion, for the writer remembers sharing in a wild-goose chase which lasted four hours of the night, along and under the same cliffs); while one skirted the marsh to Taliesin, another explored the coast. The latter party at nine o'clock in the evening discovered the involuntary tenants perched upon a rock a little way up the cliff. They had climbed to it to escape the tide which had cut them off, and here they sat, telling stones in turn, they said, to while away the time till the tide should retire. Before the waters went, however, darkness came; and either from fear of breaking bones in the descent or suspicion of some fresh treachery in the mysterious sea, they clung to their perch, blessing the mildness of a January night without wind or frost, but blessing with still more fervency the lanterns of their rescuers. They had passed five hours in this anxious situation.

This was the sportive prelude of more serious trouble. Nunquam imprudentibus imber incidit: as the servant perhaps reflected, who, on Monday, January 29th, was conveying the dinner of his master's family from the Hotel kitchen to Cambrian Terrace. As he crossed the gusty street between them, the harpies of the storm swept the dinner from dish, and rolled a prime joint over and over in the dust. A leg of mutton was following, but he caught it dexterously by the knuckle-end as it fell, and rescued so much from the wreck. Such incidents are significant: trifles light as air, no doubt, but at least they showed which way the wind blew. And did it not blow? for three days the sou'-wester had been heaping up the sea-water against the shores of Cardigan Bay. People remembered with misgivings that an expected high tide coincided in time with the gale, and shook their heads significantly as they went to bed on the eve of January 30th.

In the half light before sunrise, the classes, emerging from the school- room after morning prayers, found the street between them and the Terrace threaded by a stream of salt water, which was pouring over the sea-wall in momently increasing volume. Skirting or jumping the obstruction they reached the class-rooms, and work began. But before morning school was over the stream had become a river, and thrifty housewives were keeping out the flood from their ground-floors by impromptu dams. Those who were well placed saw a memorable sight that morn, as the terrible white rollers came remorselessly in, sheeting the black cliff sides in the distance with columns of spouted foam, then thundering on the low sea- wall, licking up or battening down the stakes of its palisades, and scattering apart and volleying before it the pebbles built in between them, till the village street was heaped with the ruins of the barrier over which the waters swept victoriously into the level plain beyond:

The feet had hardly time to flee Before it brake against the knee, And all the world was in the sea.

Those who were looking inland saw how

Along the river's bed A mighty eygre reared its head And up the Lery raging sped.

And though they could not see how the tenants of the low-lying hamlet of Ynislas fled to their upper storey as the tide plunged them into twelve feet of water; how it breached the railway beyond, sapping four miles of embankment, and sweeping the bodies of a drowned flock of sheep far inland to the very foot of the hills; yet they saw enough to make them recall the grim memories of the historic shore, and doubt if our fortunes were not about to add a chapter to the legend of the Lost Lowland Hundred.

For an hour the narrow ridge on which the village stands was swept by a storm of foam, while, from moment to moment, a wave exploding against the crest of the ridge, would leap in through the intervals between the houses, and carrying along a drift of sea-weed and shingle, splintered timber, and wrecked peat-stacks, go eddying down into the drowned pastures beyond. Yet when the ebb came, and men began to count their losses, there were but few to record. The embankment at the south end of the village had been beaten flat, and the road behind it buried under a silt of shingle; the nearest houses to it had been flooded and threatened with collapse, so that the owners were offering them next day on easy terms; from our hospital, which stood in this quarter, the one patient and his nurse were rescued on the backs of waders; the foundations of a chapel, which was building on lower ground, were reported sapped, and a staunch Churchman of our Welsh acquaintance stood rapturously contrasting the fate of the conventicle with the security of his own place of worship on the neighbouring knoll. "If Borth goes, the church won't, anyhow!" he cried, in self-forgetting fervour. No lives were lost, though several were barely saved. One of our party rescued his dog, already straining at his chain to escape a watery grave; another saved (dearer than life itself) his favourite violin. A fisherman, surprised in his kitchen, was flung down and nearly strangled between door and doorpost by the rush of a wave through the window. A neighbour was drifted out of his house on the top of one wave, and scrambled back to find the door slammed and held against him by another. Rueful groups of women stood in the street, sobbing over armfuls of what one feared might be drowned infants, but were, in fact, the little pigs which they had plucked alive and remonstrant from the flooded styes. In short, if many were frightened, few could plead to being hurt.

Meanwhile, the boys had found their way from the class-rooms upon bridges of railway-sleepers requisitioned from the station-yard. We could not but enjoy that "something not altogether unpleasing to us in the calamities of our neighbours," but the "humorous ruth," with which we contemplated the comical incidents of the disaster was exchanged in good time for practical pity. There was to be another high tide that evening, and how would the village stand this second storm of its broken defences? So the order was given to assemble in the street after dinner, and work at the repair of the breaches. The street looked like an ant-hill, as the workers, divided into gangs by houses, with the housemaster at the head of his gang, swarmed on the roadway, clearing it from the debris with pickaxe, spade, and a multitude of hands; re-stacking the cottagers' store of peat-sods, which the waves had sown broadcast; forming chains across the beach to pass up from hand to hand the large pebbles at low- water mark, to build in between the palisades; or cutting down the old stakes and driving in new ones. This last was the most attractive branch of the service. How enviable was he whom a reputation as a woodman secured the enjoyment of an axe, and the genial employ of hewing and hammering! This was much to be preferred to cutting your hands in moving rubbish or standing still to hand wet stones in a freezing wind. However, the pleasure of helping other people was common to all; and many of the young hearts, which tasted that pleasure in this rough day's labour, will have gained an impulse of prompt helpfulness that may serve them in other and ruder storms than that which shook the frail homes of these friendly villagers.

We do not know how our defences would have stood the test of battle. They were not put to the proof, for the wind, veering to the north that morning, and blowing strongly all day, reduced again the volume of the water in the bay, and the following tides came and went harmlessly. But had the morrow repeated the terrors of this day, we should hardly have been up to witness them, for (proh pudor!) we rewarded ourselves for our exertions by a lie-a-bed next morning in place of early school.

Elsewhere the storm-wave had worked more havoc. At Ynyslas, a flock of one hundred and fifteen sheep were caught in their pastures, and drowned, the farmer rescuing only eleven. The cottagers were driven to their lofts, while the tide snatched away their furniture, doors, window-frames, and tables, and strewed them along the railway banks. There was flotsam and jetsam on what was now once more the coast-line at the village of Taliesin, where in old days the bard's cradle had been washed ashore; here one poor woman recovered her parlour-table of heavy oak; her chairs had travelled farther yet to the door of a farmhouse in the extreme corner of the marsh. These people were greater sufferers than our villagers, but we could only help them by a subscription to replace their losses.

For ourselves, we suffered nothing except a temporary scarcity of coals and oil from the interruption of the railway traffic. It was a fortnight before the next train ran on the stretch between us and Machynlleth, and in the meanwhile the gap was bridged by a coach service. From four miles of embankment the ballast had been sapped away, and the sleepers and rails collapsing into the void presented a dismal picture of wreck.

Yes, we suffered one other privation. It was long before our football- field rose again from the deeps, and was dry enough for play. Its goalposts pricking up mournfully through the floods were a landmark which the boys recognised with rueful eyes in the midst of the drowned and deformed landscape.

More substantial measures than the patching up of the barricades in which we assisted must be taken if Borth is to remain permanently in the roll of Welsh villages. Our storm-wave was but part of a system of aggression which the sea is carrying out upon these coasts. Older residents remember a coach-road under the promontory, where now there is nothing but rock and seaweed, and look forward gloomily to a day when Borth will be "disturbed;" for so they euphemistically describe the catastrophe which is finally to wash it away. But an acquaintance of ours, who claims one of the longest memories in the place, is more confident. He has known Borth seventy years and as he has never seen it destroyed during all that time, does not think it will be now. His own house is safe on the hill of Old Borth, so he judges with all the calm of conscious security. His conviction, however, is not shared by his townsfolk, who were soon busy holding meetings, and considering schemes for the provision of something better than these moral guarantees. Heartily do we hope that funds and measures will be found to save our friends from another and more calamitous "disturbance." But a letter from Borth, a year later, speaks of the sea as again threatening their security. "We are not afraid of him, though," the correspondent, one of our landladies, devoutly adds, "for he is under a Master." All the same, we should like to hear of a stout sea-wall as well.

Once again the elements caused us alarm. A heavy gale got up in the evening of February 19th, and roared all night upon the roof of the hotel, tearing up the fluttering tiles in patches, and sending them adrift through the air, till the master who slept under the leads, in charge of the top storey, began to doubt whether the straining roof would last overhead till morning. It was small consolation that this time he and his neighbours should at least "die a dry death," so the inmates of the floor were summoned from their beds in the small hours to spend the rest of the night in a bivouack on the ground-floor. One or another of those luckless youngsters will, in after days, remember, as a cheerful incident, the arrival on the scene of the Headmaster, with a store of biscuits and such supplies as could be requisitioned at the moment, to provision the watch. Your schoolboy, he reflected, is hungry at all times; what must he be at night when dragged from bed to save his life, and forced to sit up, rather cold and very empty, for several hours before daybreak. Solaced, however, by these beguilements, the hours passed cheerfully away.



CHAPTER XII.—FAREWELL.

The primal sympathy, Which, having been, must ever be.

WORDSWORTH.

Thenceforward the weeks rolled smoothly on, unmarked by moving incident, till they gladdened us with the growing light of spring, and brought us within near sight of our home. Must the truth be told? We are all of us loyal sons of Uppingham, but not all of us were glad to find our return to the mother-country was at last arriving. So far away from the offence, we need not fear attainder if we confess, some few of us, that our hearts were not whole in their welcome of the long-deferred event. It belonged to the irony that waits on all lives which are not too dull a material for fortune's jests, that we should cease to desire our home just when long patience and often-thwarted efforts, and

The slow, sad hours which bring us all things ill, And all good things from evil,

had brought its coveted security at last within our reach. For so it was with some of us. Perhaps the air of sea and mountain had got into the blood, and infected it with a certain disrelish for the restraints, the even decorum, and the tamer surroundings of our life in the Midlands. Well, we are not the only emigrants who have preferred their backwoods to the streets of the mother city, nor the first campaigners who have come back to home-quarters a trifle spoiled by adventure. And, moreover, while everything about us was a reminder of what we must forego, there was nothing to tell us of what a greeting our townsmen were preparing for us, or of the solid mutual good which filled the vista beyond that auspicious welcome.

However, alike for those who were impatient and those who were half reluctant to attain it, the equal-handed hours brought the end of our exile. On one of our last evenings, April 6th, a reading was given in the school-room, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with Mendelssohn's music; no unfit close, we said, to our annns mirabilis. For, indeed, its incidents had been "such stuff as dreams are made of," as whimsical if not quite as harmless, as if their plot had been directed by the blithe goblin of Shakespeare's fantasy. The chorus of readers and of singers were so far encouraged by their success, as to offer a second recital as a farewell entertainment to the good people of Borth. They enjoyed it hugely. Doubtless some of the simpler members of that audience would follow the drift of the Sassenach poet only at a certain distance; but Bottom's "transformed scalp," a pasteboard ass's-head, come all the way from Nathan's, was eloquent without help of an interpreter. "Oh! that donkey, he was beautiful," was the dramatic criticism of an esteemed friend, a fisher's wife. The criticism was at least sincere; from the moment of the monster's entry she had been in one rapture of laughter, till her "face was like a wet cloak ill laid up." Well, the kind soul had reason good enough for her merriment. But had the reason been less, our neighbours would not have lost the occasion of dropping the shyness of intercourse in a frank outburst of good fellowship.

But we took a more solemn farewell on the morrow, the 10th of April. The parts were reversed now, and we were the spectators. Just at sundown of a day of clear spring weather, the school was gathered at their doors watching a long procession of villagers advancing up the street towards them. We had heard whispers in the morning of a "demonstration," and now it was come. Through the dust we caught sight of banners flying at the head of the column; under them marched the choir of children singing, and behind them the whole village was a-foot. The people of Borth, of every age and degree, from the first householders and yeomen of the place to the fishermen's boys and girls, had come to wish us God speed. Reaching the school quarters they halted, the boys lining the roadway on each side of them, and filling the broad flight of steps before the hotel doors. When the cheers for "Uppingham" and our answering cheers for "Borth" had rung out across the sands to seaward, there was an interval, filled up with songs by the children, while they waited the arrival of the spokesmen, whom they had charged with their valediction. When these arrived, a deputation of the villagers moved into the school-room shed, and there presented a brief address, which ran thus: "We, the inhabitants of Borth, beg to tender our most sincere thanks to Dr. Thring, and all the masters and scholars of the celebrated Uppingham School, for the very many generous acts and kindly feelings exhibited to us during their sojourn here." The address was introduced and explained by speeches marked by refined feeling, and delivered with a noticeable grace of manner. We will here cite, though for another reason, a few words of the speaker who moved the address; he commented on the discipline which (from the evidence of their conduct when at large) seemed to rule the school; naively but pointedly he noted that no offence had ever been given; "No boy had laughed at the villagers, if they were old and queer-looking or queerly dressed; there had been no disorder, no shabby act, nothing undecent" (so he put it in his unpractised English) "during the whole twelve months we had spent among them." We give his testimony without note or comment, sure that the facts would not be better told in words less simple. They were little things he witnessed to; was it a little thing that the witness could be truly borne?

The boys were not present to hear the speeches, but they will like well to remember the scene without doors at that unlooked-for reunion of school and village. It was a scene made up of homely elements enough, but somehow, in our own memory at least, few pictures will remain printed in such fast colours. Clearly, as on that evening, we shall always see, distinct in the quiet light of the afterglow, the ranks of serious faces, touched and stilled by the surprise of a contagious sympathy, as English boys and Welsh cottagers looked each other in the face, and felt, if for the space of a few heartbeats only, an outflash of that ancient kinship which binds man and man together more than race and circumstance divide.

It pleases the smaller kind of criticism to cheapen the meaning of such incidents as this, and explain them by the easy reference to interested and conventional motives. Wiser men will take occasion to rejoice that human nature is after all so kind; and if this be error, we would rather err with the wise. Take once again our thanks, kind people of Borth, if our thanks are worth your taking. You showed us no little kindness in a strange land, and the day is far off when we shall forget the friendly, gentle people whose name is the memorial of a great ill escaped, of much good enjoyed, in the days that are over, and the landmark of who knows what greater good in the days that are to be.



CONCLUSION.

Perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world, except for those phlegmatic natures, who, I suspect, would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope, and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentleman and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

GEORGE ELIOT.

[Greek verse]

ANTIGONE.

All is over now; April was just a twelfth-night old when the school departed. Some of our company have lingered on for business, a few from reluctance to have done with it. But to-day the last group has taken wing for the Midlands. Old "Borth," the colley dog, followed them to the station, and poked his nose into the carriage to take his leave. Old Borth—we had almost forgotten him, and that had been deep ingratitude for he was not the least warm-hearted of our friends in Wales. His master lived two miles away; but soon after our arrival, Borth had come down from the hills to attach himself to our fortunes, and henceforth became, as it were, our familiar, the pet of the regiment, like the goat of the "23rd." He knew his position, and was a stickler for formalities; he had a wag of the tail for every boy who wore the image of the venerable schoolmaster upon his cap; but if he met him bare-headed, or, by any chance, in an indistinctive head-gear, he would cut that boy dead, were he never so much the same urchin from whose hand he had yesterday eaten a cheese-cake. That was his official rebuke for the irregularity. By day, Borth would bask in some sunny corner of our quarters; at night, he has been known to venture on a nearer intimacy where doors were left open. We found you once ourselves, Borth, curled up and asleep upon our own bed. You woke up, shook yourself with a modest, but not startled manner, and walked quietly away, like a gentleman.

Ah! kind friend, you showed us the sincerest of flatteries, that of imitation. You left a comfortable home for chance quarters and uncertain fare, that you might be one of us, an outcast among outcasts. Now we must part, for our home will spare us no longer, as neither will yours spare you. And so the last good-bye is said, and you are limping away to your hills again, with dejection expressed in every fibre of your frame, from the drooping ears to the last hair on your tail.

All is over, and the place is very silent, except for the clink of hammers where they are breaking down our wooden walls, and, seaward, the cry and splash of gull and tern dipping for their prey in the shoal of herring-fry which is wandering about the bay. Close inshore a porpoise is wallowing, like the jolly sea-pig that he is, in his berth of glistening water. The wild creatures seem to have grown tamer since there are no strollers to keep them aloof. This morning, as we passed his pool, the stately heron let us come within twenty yards of him before he got leisurely upon the wing. The village seems even quieter; the people at their doors betray, to our fancy, a certain lassitude as if, like merrymakers on the morrow of a revel, they felt somewhat sleepy and sorry, now that the stirring social year is over, and the little fishing town has returned to its "old solitary nothingness."

Yes, the silence has come down again; but it is a silence full of voices. For, as it often happens that, when things without are stillest, men hear most audibly the tumult of their own brains, so is it now with us. Action is ended, and memory begins to work. Into the vacuum which the silence makes, the stream of our little history pours in a long backwater. Our thoughts go back to the beginning of it, the hour when, as we were sailing prosperously under press of canvas, the blast struck us suddenly out of a sunny sky. We live again the slow months of enforced vacation, and the brief spell of apparent security, broken by the second stroke. We recall the slow and painful sickening of hope, amid the frustration of attempted remedies; the watchings and communings by late firesides; the morning questionings and bulletins; the deepening of fears, until the moment when the sharp pressure of calamity became the liberating touch, and made a hazardous adventure seem a welcome alternative. Not less distinctly we remember the zest with which the wretched waiting for evil tidings was exchanged for hopeful activity; the rush of preparations; the anxiety which watched their passage through the ordeal of practice; the growing sense of security; the mellowing down of novelty and privation into routine and ease; the contrast, all the while, between the outward peace of the colony, and the secret difficulties of finance and commissariat; the long intermittent crisis which gave the administrative no rest; the hopes and efforts for our return home, and the reversal of them; all this, and—and—very much else as well, which was of acutest interest at the time, and which it will become convenient to describe only when it will be of interest to no one. All this passes before us in the series of a long dissolving view, full of bright lights, and only less full of unlovely shadows.

And, somehow, as we review the past this evening, pacing the beach in the twilight, the fact accomplished seems to us not smaller, but greater than when we lived in it. There are moments some would say of illusion, some of vision—when the things most familiar to our eyes and thoughts, whether in nature or human society, surprise us with a dignity and beauty not discovered in them before. That glamour is in the air this evening. Perhaps the night-wind, which creeps to us from over the grassy tomb of Taliesin, warrior and bard has touched the fancy with a breath out of his heroic days. What wonder if it were so? Thirteen centuries ago the hero became the guardian of the shore; but the story which ends to-day is, perhaps, as worthy note as any he has watched from his hill-side. Those who rate the dignity of human action by other standards than the breadth and conspicuousness of its stage, will not mock us because we find some stuff of romance in the homely circumstance and not always epic passages of this modern episode of school.

But if the stranger who may read the tale will spare his scorn—those for whom we shall tell it would forgive even a bolder word; for some of them were themselves a part of it, and others will make it a part of their heritage in the past. English schools have always honoured their traditions, counting them the better part of their wealth. Some have majestic memories of royal benefactors, or can point to a muster-roll of splendid names, whose greatness was cradled in their walls. Such traditions are not ours. A past, not brief, but not memorable, has denied us these. But a tradition we have henceforward which is all our own and wholly single in its kind. We persuade ourselves that in far-off years those who bear our name will say that, in the memory of a great disaster overcome, no mean heirloom has been left them. They will not be ashamed of a generation which, in an hour of extreme peril, did not despair of the commonwealth, but dared to trust their faith in a further destiny, and saved for those who should come after them a cause which must else have perished in the dark. Stet fortuna domus. And stand it will if there is assurance in augury. For the fairy legend has a truth in fact, and the luck of a house, grasped daringly and held fast in an act of venturous hardihood, will not break or be lost again until the sons forget to guard it.

Here and there, at any rate, among the posterity which will sometime fill our ranks, there will not be wanting generous and gifted spirits, illustres animae nostrumque in nomen iturae, who will rejoice in making good the forecast that the venture was not made in vain. They will possess more worthily the good which an elder race foresaw and laboured not all unworthily to preserve. To their safe keeping we commend as under a seal, the legacy of hopes which are better left unspoken now.



APPENDIX.

HOW WE LEFT BORTH.

(From "The Cambrian News.")

On Tuesday evening, April 10, the inhabitants of Borth, almost to a man, turned out to take part in a farewell demonstration to the masters and scholars of Uppingham School, after their twelve months' residence in Wales. Shortly after seven o'clock a procession of the inhabitants was formed, and, headed by a flag-bearer, made its way to the square in front of the Cambrian Hotel, where several songs were sung by the assembly under the schoolmaster's (Mr. Jones's) direction; and at the conclusion a hearty round of cheers was given for the Uppingham School, who immediately responded by making the place ring again with three enthusiastic cheers for Borth. The assembly then adjourned to the wooden building in the hotel-yard, when Mr. Jones, Brynowen, was voted to the chair on the proposition of Mr. Lewis, Post Office, seconded by Mr. Jones, Neptune Baths.

The CHAIRMAN said, as the meeting was aware, the object of the demonstration—and he was exceedingly glad to see such a popular demonstration—was, that the Borth people might have a chance of giving public expression to the kind feeling of respect they entertained for Mr. Thring, the masters, and scholars of Uppingham School before they left Borth, after a twelve months' sojourn there. (Cheers.) When some twelve months ago a rumour came to Borth respecting the advent of Uppingham School, a few old women and nervous people, in the innocence of their hearts, were afraid they would be swamped by an inundation of Goths and Vandals. (Laughter.) The meeting would, however, agree with him that kinder-hearted gentlemen than the masters, and better-behaved boys than the scholars, could not be found. (Hear, hear.) There had been no town- and-gown feeling existing similar to what prevailed in places of greater pretensions. The people of the village and the School had pulled together in a friendly manner, and everything had gone on quite smoothly. (Hear.) After referring to the progress of the School under the headmastership of Mr. Thring, and remarking that the older schools would have to look to their laurels, as Uppingham was treading close upon their heels, the Chairman said that in some fifteen or twenty years to come many of the boys would be in Parliament, some of them officers in the army or navy, fighting the battles of the nation, some of them would be barristers, seeing that the people got fair play in the courts of law, others would no doubt be eminent merchants, importing the produce of foreign countries, whilst others would be surgeons, like Dr. Childs—(loud cheering)—and physicians. They would therefore exercise an influence over the destinies of the nation. (Cheers.) The people of Borth were exceedingly sorry that the school was going away. Its members would be missed very much indeed. He owed the Uppingham people no ill-feeling, but if a case of smallpox, the cholera, or some other virulent disease broke out in that place and prevented the return of the school, he was sure that Borth people would not feel at all sorry. (Laughter and cheers.) There was the name of a gentleman whom he might mention. That gentleman had earned the gratitude of the Borth people perhaps more than anyone else. He referred to Dr. Childs. (Applause.) He had acted the part of the Good Samaritan thoroughly, responding as readily to the call of the sick and suffering at midnight as at noon. (Cheers.) He would detain them no longer, but ask Mr. Lewis to submit a proposition to the meeting.

Mr. LEWIS, Post Office, said he had very great pleasure in reading the resolution, because he knew it would be heartily responded to by everyone present. It was as follows:—"We, the inhabitants of Borth, beg to tender our most sincere thanks to Dr. Thring, and all the masters and scholars of the celebrated Uppingham School, for the very many generous acts and kindly feelings exhibited towards us during their sojourn here." Mr. Lewis followed by commenting upon the excellent discipline which evidently ruled the school, judging from their exemplary conduct out of school. He was not aware of any shabby, mean, or ungenerous act committed by the young gentlemen during the whole twelve months they had been at Borth. (Applause.) The meeting would remember the assistance rendered in the terrific storm in February. Even the ladies came out and helped the people in their distress—(loud applause)—thereby setting an excellent example to the women of Borth. (Cheers.) They had not only worked as hard as they could, but subscribed money among themselves which they distributed to the most needy of those who had sustained loss by the storm. (Applause.) The money then distributed would pass into other hands in a short time, but the kind feelings the act engendered would last for ever. (Applause.) He only hoped that each and all connected with Uppingham School would enjoy long, prosperous, and useful lives. (Loud applause.)

Mr. JONES, The Baths, expressed the fears he once entertained, in common with others, that the Uppingham School would take Borth by storm, an opinion he had to change entirely after the boys had been there a week, for instead of laughing at the quaintness of some of the Welsh costumes or the peculiarities of the nation, they had obtained the goodwill of the inhabitants by their gentleness of demeanour, and completely won their hearts on that memorable day when masters and scholars, young and old, turned out to assist in reducing, as much as possible, the ill-effects of the storm. (Cheers.) He did not exactly wish that some contagious disease would break out at Uppingham, but he hoped that when the School got back it would repent, and so return to Borth. (Laughter and cheers.)

Speeches were also made by Mr. Thomas G. Thomas and Mr. R. Pritchard Roberts, Garibaldi House.

The Rev. E. THRING, M.A., then rose amid cheers and said: Mr. Chairman and our friends at Borth, I have made many speeches in my life since I have been master of this school. Two-and-twenty years of school-mastering gives a good deal of exercise for the tongue from time to time; but never in my life have I stood up to make any speech which I feel so little capable of making as I do to-night; not from want of practice, but because the feelings you have aroused in us are such—and our sojourn here has been such a boon to us (cheers)—that it is impossible for me to tell you the value we set on living here, and the welcome we have received. (Applause.) I never heard anything sweeter to my ear than your singing to-night. The time it must have taken, the goodwill manifested in the songs, and altogether the circumstances under which they were delivered, and we on our last day here, made them go down into my heart, and into all our hearts with peculiar power. (Cheers.) Never in my life have I had such testimony to the school which I cared so much for, as the testimony you have given to-night. We get our reputation in the English world, but what is that compared to the inner life to which you have borne witness. What signifies it whether we know much or little in comparison with the fact that we have a character of life which you like. It is life answering unto life across all those ties, both of nationality—for I grieve I cannot speak in your native tongue—and also of distance which set gulfs between man and man, but cannot separate life when it is true. (Hear, hear.) If your life is true, and our lives are true, then it flows across and we meet as to-night one united body of living men. (Cheers.) And this is what gives a peculiar value to our being here. You know as none can know what this school is. We came among you as strangers, and you looked upon us with the eyes of strangers; we stayed among you as friends, and we part from you as friends. (Cheers.) Everybody knows that the one thing on earth which makes life pleasant is the friendly atmosphere in which men live—the one thing that makes it hateful is to be surrounded by thoroughly bitter hearts. There is an old saying that "stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." No, the life within can make any place enjoyable—nay, happy. Yet, I think it is better to be in happy surroundings too. Of this, however, you may be sure: those glorious hills of yours, this sea, and all the happy hours we have spent wandering about, will not easily pass out of our minds. The jewel of a friendly spirit has also been set in very bright surroundings. We do rejoice in the life we have had here, and all that we have found. (Cheers.) You have spoken to-night of the good conduct of the school, and have said that we have caused no trouble since our stay here. That like many other questions, has two sides. Is it not a great credit to this place that when between a hundred and seventy and a hundred and eighty strange boys have been put into your cottages and homes, there has not arisen a single difficulty for the whole year? I say it is quite as much a feather in your caps as in ours. I am proud of it—very proud of it. (Applause.) I would also refer to the extensive power which lies in a great school. It is quite true that some few years hence, these boys whom you have looked on with interest will be schoolmasters, barristers, and leaders in every part of the world. (Applause.) There is not a quarter of the globe where we have not our representative. It is now, and not in the future only, that I may venture to say that there is no part of this globe where men are to be found, where, here and there, Borth has not been heard of this year. (Cheers.) I will mention two facts only which may interest you. This very week, quite unconscious of this meeting to-night, I sent a letter to North Canada, with, I may say, a very glowing account of Borth in it—(cheers)—and the day before yesterday, having a little leisure, I wrote to the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces of India, when I mentioned Borth in equally warm terms. (Applause.) That, I need not say, is going on all around us. These three hundred pens of our school are busy day by day giving to their friends their own views of our life here, and I may no doubt say that on the whole they are pleasant views. (Cheers.) It is not only a pleasant fact to mention, but I hold that where life is working well with life it is a real power for good that goes out into all lands, a sort of missionary force traversing this earth, speaking of us as capable of coming here, and of the welcome you have given us. (Hear, hear.) That, however, would be a slight thing if we did not leave behind us, as I am sure we do, that feeling of happy life which we take away with us. (Cheers.) For my own part, at all events, if I leave, it is not the last time I hope to spend in Borth. (Applause.) I know no place that has been more attractive to me, no place where, if I can, I shall more readily come back to—not, I hope, next time as an exile, but coming from home to happy holiday to spend it pleasantly among my friends here. (Applause.)

MR. LEWIS proposed a hearty vote of thanks to Dr. Childs for his gratuitous attendance on the sick in his professional capacity. (Loud cheers.)

DR. CHILDS referred to the pleasure experienced in doing a kindly action, and afterwards humorously added that at one time he thought of setting up in practice at Borth, but finding the place so healthy he had given up the idea. (Laughter and cheers.) He should, however, know where to send his convalescent patients in future. He should recommend them to take the first train, and spend a week on the sands at Borth, with an occasional dip in the Neptune Baths. (Loud laughter and cheers.) Three cheers were given for the ladies of Uppingham School, and the assembly separated after singing the National Anthem.



HOW WE CAME BACK TO UPPINGHAM.

(From the SCHOOL MAGAZINE.)

(Signifer, statue signum, hic manebimus optime.)

Who has not known the moment when, as he looked on some familiar landscape, its homely features and sober colouring have suddenly, under some chance inspiration of the changing sky, become alive with an unexpected beauty: its unambitious hills take on them the dignity of mountains, its woods and streams swell and broaden with a majesty not their own. Though, perhaps, it is their own, if Nature, like Man, is most herself when seen in her best self; if her brightest moments are her truest.

Shall we be thought fanciful if we confess that we felt something of this same kind when, returning from a year-long exile, in the last gleams of a bright May evening we turned the corner of the High Street of Uppingham, and came face to face with our welcome. The old street, seen again at last after so many months of banishment, the same and not the same; the old, homely street—forgive us, walls and roofs of Uppingham, and forgive us, you who tenant them, if sometimes perhaps to some of us, as our eyes swept the grand range of Welsh mountain-tops, or travelled out over limitless sea distances, there would rise forbidden feelings of reluctance to exchange these fair things for the bounded views and less unstinted beauties of our midland home: forgive us, as you may the more readily because these thoughts, if any such lingered, were charmed away on the instant by the sight of the real Uppingham. There lay the path to our home, an avenue of triumphal arches soaring on pillars of greenery, plumed with sheaves of banners, and enscrolled with such words as those to whom they spoke will know how to read and remember. Our eyes could follow through arch after arch the reaches of the gently-winding street, alive from end to end with waving flags, green boughs, and fanciful devices, till the quiet golden light in the western sky closed the vista, and glorified with such a touch of its own mellow splendour the ranges of brown gables and their floating banners, that for a moment we half dreamed ourselves spectators of an historic pageant in some "dim, rich city" of old-world renown. Only for a moment, though; for when we drop our eyes to the street below us, those are our own townsfolk, well-remembered faces, that throng every doorstep and fill the overflowing pavements and swarming roadway. Yes, they are our own townsfolk, and they are taking care to let us know it—such a welcome they have made ready for us.

We hardly know how to describe with the epic dignity which it merits the act by which they testified their joy at our return. We who saw the sight were reminded of an incident in the AEneid—

Instar montis equum divina Palladis arte Aedificant, sectaque intexunt abiete costas; Votum pro reditu simulant.

* * * * *

Pueri circum innuptaeque puellae Sacra canuut, funemque manu contingere gaudent.

But the ill-starred folk of Troy could not have shown more enthusiasm in haling within their walls the fatal wooden horse, than did the men and boys of Uppingham, who harnessed themselves, some four-score of them, to that guileless structure, which, though indeed it has some other name, we will call at present our triumphal car. They harnessed themselves to it at the east-end of the town, and drew it with the pomp of a swarming multitude all the length of the long street to its western mouth and half the way back again. On went that unwieldy car of triumph, bearing a freight of eager faces behind its windows, and carrying a crowd of sitters, precariously clustered wherever a perch could be found on its swaying roof, under the verdant span of the arches and the flow of the streamers:

Ilia subit mediaeque minans inlabitur urbi.

On it went, with the hum of applauding voices increasing round it, till the popular fervour found articulate utterance in a burst of jubilant music. There swept past our ears, first, the moving strains of "Auld lang syne," and then, as if in answer to the appeal to "Auld acquaintance," came the jocund chorus "There is nae luck about the house"—most eloquent assurance that we were welcome home. And then in turn the music died down, and the crowd round the now halted procession cheered with a will for "the school," "the Headmaster and the masters," and the school taking up with zest the genial challenge, returned the blessing with such a shout as if they meant the echoes of that merry evening to make amends in full to street and houses for their fourteen months of silence.

It was "all over but the shouting:" but that was not over till some hours of dusk had gathered over school and town. For first the multitude besieged the well-known mighty gates, behind which lies the studious quiet of the Schoolhouse Quad. When they were admitted they came in like a flood, and filled the space within; but for all they were so many, there was an orderliness and quietude in the strange assemblage which made their presence there seem not strange at all, and they listened like one man to the words in which the Headmaster, who came out to meet them, framed his thanks for this unequivocal welcome. This done, they flowed out again, and streamed across the valley and up the hill to carry the same message of goodwill to the distant houses, and so with more cheering and more speeches came to an end a day of happiest omen for the joint fortunes of Uppingham School and Town.

A few additional details are needed to complete our account. A friend, remarkable for his plain common-sense, reminds us that the epic vehicle we so indistinctly describe, was the Seaton 'bus, and that the music was due to "the splendid band connected with Mrs. Edmonds' menagerie, which happened to be in the town." We are not in a position to deny either statement, or another to the effect that "the conveyances which accompanied the 'bus formed a procession of considerable length," having been halted by arrangement outside the town, and formed into file for the entry. When the same friend hazards some further criticism on a confusion of dates and incidents in our narrative, in which he finds the events of two days, a Friday and a Saturday, presented as in a single scene, we feel it time to silence him by an appeal, which he does not follow, to the "truer historic sense" and the "massive grouping" of imaginative history.



THE ADDRESS.

On Tuesday of the next week, May 8, an address was presented by a deputation of the townspeople to the Headmaster and assistant masters. The ceremony took place in the school-room, the body of which was almost filled by those who had assembled to support their deputation, while the masters, their families, and the Sixth Form were seated on the tiers of the orchestra. The deputation coming forward, Mr. Bell said that Mr. Hawthorn and himself had been requested by their fellow townsmen to undertake the presentation of an address, in explanation of which he would make a few remarks. In an appreciative speech he reviewed the circumstances which had given rise to the present occasion, gave some explanation of the form and terms of the address, and took occasion to add that although the ladies were not mentioned in the address, the townspeople were not unmindful of the energetic way in which they had seconded the efforts of the masters.

MR. HAWTHORN said he had been asked to read the Address, but that he was unwilling to do so without some slight expression of the feelings with which he and others took part in the presentation of it. Though they were met to congratulate the school, they felt, he said, that there were good grounds to congratulate themselves as townsmen. The absence of the school had pressed with greater or less severity on many tradesmen, being felt more especially by a large number of the poorer inhabitants, and had made it evident to many how poor a place Uppingham would be without a school upon its present important scale. But they valued the School on other grounds too; they recognize the advantage of the presence among them of so many representatives of liberal education and its broader views on matters of public interest. To the Headmaster it must be a cause for rejoicing and thankfulness that the labour of his life had been saved from a sudden and unfortunate conclusion. To him and his assistant masters, the parents, and the boys, by whose loyal adherence the time of trial had been happily passed through, their congratulations were offered. He proceeded to read the address, which was received with much applause by the townspeople. It is a handsomely illuminated document, to which between sixty and seventy names are attached; the terms of it are as follows:

"To the Rev. Edward Thring, M.A., Headmaster, and to the Assistant Masters of Uppingham School.

"Gentlemen,—We, the undersigned residents in Uppingham, have great pleasure in meeting you with a hearty welcome on the re-assembling of the school in full numbers in its native home, and gladly avail ourselves of this opportunity of conveying to you our congratulations that the period of anxiety and trial through which you have so successfully passed has clearly demonstrated the sound principles upon which the school has been conducted, and which have raised it to its present eminence as one of the great schools of the country, and have won for it the confidence of parents in all parts of the kingdom, many of whom have entrusted their sons to your care at Borth, and are continuing that trust now that you are returning to your homes.

"We desire also to express our sense of the courage and enterprise manifested in removing the school from Uppingham at the time of the anxious crisis in February, 1876.

"And we pray Almighty God that it may please Him to bless the school, and that under His guidance those who from time to time leave the school may as scholars and Christian gentlemen uphold its fame in whatever sphere they may be placed.

"Uppingham, May, 1877."

The HEADMASTER then rose and said: "Mr. Bell, Mr. Hawthorn, and friends in Uppingham,—Home is home, and you may be quite sure that we, at all events, who went through exile felt it indeed to be home when we came back again. (Applause.) It does not signify what the circumstances may be, but it is not possible to live long in a place and to have your home there without taking root in it, and having fibres sent deep which cannot be torn up without pain. (Applause.) We are very grateful, therefore, for the hearty, the enthusiastic welcome you gave us on our return. (Cheers.) Assuredly as our eyes looked on this pleasant hill and the familiar fields, we felt a deep thankfulness for the great peril passed, the page of life turned, and a year such as never can come again closed with success. (Applause.) And it is a pleasant spot to look on when you come down the dip of the valley before you near Uppingham, and look up and see the ancient homes crowning the brow of the hill—it is a fair sight to any eye, even to a stranger's eye, the pleasant homes of Uppingham, with the church and its spire in the midst, the spire of the school chapel beyond, each adding, methinks, to the beauty of the other, and both alike in their upward spring and their holy worship. It is a pleasant spot to look on, and you made your old picturesque street very beautiful with your decorations and that bright outbreak of welcome which greeted us as we came in. (Cheers.) The school hardly knew what we meant—they did not know when we asked them to cheer at the top of the hill; but as the stream of life wound round and came in sight of that avenue of arches and flags, then they understood what was meant, and they were ready enough to second it. (Cheers.) We were very thankful, also, that you recognise in that address—that able address and pleasing to receive—how hard it was to go, how great a risk had to be faced to save the school; for that was what was at stake. I do not say that in years to come there should not again have been a school as great as this, or greater; but this I am sure of, that we were in the very last week of the life of this present school; that at the beginning of the week, when it was decided to go, there was news from different quarters that made it absolutely certain that another Monday would have seen no school here. For a school is not a mere machine which can be set going to order, and which anybody who happens at the time to have the mastery of can deal with like a machine. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," says Shakespeare in one of his plays; and the rejoinder comes, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?" (Laughter and cheers.) Now that is just what they won't do; and we simply had no choice; we lay absolutely helpless before the fact that ruin stared us in the face, and we could not stir hand or foot to stop it unless we had been able then to find a door of escape. This present school was at an end, and neither I nor some others amongst us could have set foot again in Uppingham as our home. Now I do assure you ruin is a hard thing to look on after a life-work of many years of labour—not a less hard thing because the sun rose as usual, and it was all peace, and the buildings looked as of old, and the fields were just as they had always been; but an invisible barrier had risen up, and we had no place here any more. To see the four-and-twenty years of life go at a touch—indeed it was hard to think of. "For my part, I have built my heart in the courses of the wall"—(cheers)—and nothing short of this impelled us to that dire necessity of leaping in the dark, to go we did not know where, and when we found the where, not knowing who would follow us. But it was worth while to run any risk—to face any danger—to keep together the life of this place, and that its name should not go out in England. (Loud cheers.) We did not know who would follow us, and it was a day to be remembered—a day of much cheer, though full of labour and trial and fear also, when on that 4th of April three hundred came in. (Loud applause.) Not above two or three that night were wanting of those who were going to remain at the school. (Cheers.) Well have you taken in your address that staunch adherence of parent and boy as the proudest honour that a school can boast of (cheers), and well have you noted that at Borth also the entries kept level with the leavings, and that we have brought back this year—this day—almost a hundred boys who had never seen Uppingham. (Renewed cheering.) This was worth fighting for; this is worth rejoicing. The school was saved, and we and you to-night once more meet together as one body. (Loud applause.) We are united now as we never have been before methinks (cheers); for never before, to my knowledge, in England, have town and school been so completely welded together as your welcome to us home and our presence here together to- night shows us to be now. (Loud and long-continued applause.) There have been many blessings in this great trial, but certainly not least do I set that, that we and you are once more met as one. Your work and ours is so mixed up—our work so mixed with yours, and yours with ours—that it is not possible that anything should go out of this place, any life come forth from it, which does not to a great degree bring honour or discredit to both; and I do think (what was said to-night) that we are here together to work in the highest way, not as a matter of pecuniary advantage only in a place like this, but simply that we, one with another, should push forward life and make it crown that living edifice of truth, which, as it seems to me, is town and school working together. And what a type that town is. "A city set upon a hill cannot be hid;" and surely as a school and a home, a home of learning and light, this place is both actually and figuratively set upon its hill. Everything of the past year has gone out into land after land, in letters and papers and narratives on all sides: the busy-boy mind and the busy-boy pen photographs most accurately all the minute incidents that interest their opening life, and it passes out everywhere. I know that in India, and China, and Australia, and Canada—and I might go on with half the countries in the world—there has been talk in many a distant home of what has happened here. It may very well be that at this moment your names are on many lips as letters of English news have come in lately from England, and your welcome of us will travel out to the ends of the earth, so great is the power of "a city set upon a hill." And when you pray that we may be Christian gentlemen in the life that is coming, I say it lies a great deal in your own hands. Help us by so smoothing our path in all ways so that your honour may be our honour and your work our work, and that as we are grateful to you to-night so the world outside may be grateful to you also for work hereafter, and that none shall go out of Uppingham School and shall not carry wherever he goes a thankful memory of Uppingham town, and that whenever the name of Uppingham is heard in any part of the world it shall be that of an honoured place, with no divided interest, but one place working wisely, so that the world may be grateful for good work done, as we to-night are grateful for the welcome given, grateful for the lightening of our burdens, grateful for the possibility of good work in the future, most grateful for the happy homes you have given us in welcoming us home so fervently. I thank you most heartily in the name of the school and the masters and myself for this address, which I trust will for ever remain not the least honoured relic of this school."

The Headmaster sat down again amid much cheering from the audience of townspeople, to which the small party of boys present found voice to make no ineffective answer in three salutes 'for Uppingham town.'

* * * * *

CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.



Footnotes:

{12} "Prom. Vinct.," 904.

{19} The Times, Friday, April 14th, 1876.

{46} "Fifty Years of my Life," Albemarle, p. 308.

{66} Believers in augury are too seldom confronted with the negative instance. May we then invite their attention to the following? The address was published in a paragraph of The Times, but the words "under the same leadership" were omitted. Nevertheless, to the discredit of omination, under the same leadership the school did return.

THE END