START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UPPINGHAM BY THE SEA*** Transcribed from the 1878 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk UPPINGHAM BY THE SEA. A Narrative of the Year at Borth. BY J. H. S. [Greek text]. London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1878. [_All Rights reserved_.] CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. EDUARDO THRING, _SCHOLAE UPPINGHAMIENSIS CONDITORI ALTERI_, _OB CIVES SERVATOS_: ET MAGISTRIS ADJUTORIBUS, QUI, SALUTE COMMUNI IN ULTIMUM ADDUCTA DISCRIMEN, DE RE PUBLICA NON DESPERAVERUNT. PREFACE. In the spring of 1876 and of 1877, letters under the heading "Uppingham by the Sea" were published in _The Times_ newspaper, and were read with interest by friends of the school. We have thought the following narrative would be best introduced to those readers under a name already pleasantly familiar to them, and have borrowed, with the writer's permission, the title of his sketches for our own more detailed account of the same events. The readers whom we have in view will demand no apology for the attempt to supply a circumstantial record of so memorable an episode in the school's history. It deserves indeed an abler historian; but one qualification at any rate may be claimed by the present writer: an eye- witness from first to last, but a minor actor only in the scenes he chronicles, he enjoyed good opportunities of watching the play, and risks no personal modesty in relating what he saw. The best purpose of the narrative will have been served if any Uppingham boy, as he reads these pages, finds in them a new reason for loyalty to the society whose name he bears. JUNE 27TH, 1878, FOUNDER'S DAY. CHAPTER I.--EXILES, OLD AND NEW. "_O what have we ta'en_?" _said the fisher-prince_, "_What have we ta'en this morning's tide_? _Get thee down to the wave_, _my carl_, _And row me the net to the meadow's-side_." _In he waded, the fisher-carl_, _And_ "_Here_," _quoth he_, "_is a wondrous thing_! _A cradle_, _prince_, _and a fair man-child_, _Goodly to see as the son of a king_!" _The fisher-prince he caught the word_, _And_ "_Hail_," _he cried_, "_to the king to be_! _Stranger he comes from the storm and the night_; _But his fame shall wax, and his name be bright_, _While the hills look down on the Cymry sea_." FINDING OF TALIESIN. Elphin, son of Gwyddno, the prince who ruled the coasts between the Dovey and the Ystwith, came down on a May-day morning to his father's fishing- weir. All that was taken that morning was to be Elphin's, had Gwyddno said. Not a fish was taken that day; and Elphin, who was ever a luckless youth, would have gone home empty-handed, but that one of his men found, entangled in the poles of the weir, a coracle, and a fair child in it. This was none other than he who was to be the father of Cymry minstrelsy, and whom then and there his rescuers named Taliesin, which means Radiant Brow. His mother, Ceridwen, seeking to be rid of her infant, but loath to have the child's blood on her head, had launched him in this sea proof cradle, to take the chance of wind and wave. The spot where he came to land bears at this day the name of Taliesin. On the hill-top above it men show the grave where the bard reposes and "glories in his namesake shore." * * * * * There is something magnetic in a famous site: it attracts again a like history to the old stage. Thirteen centuries and a half after the finding of Taliesin, the same shore became once again an asylum for other outcasts, whose fortunes we propose to chronicle. But since the day when they drifted to land the cradle of the bard, the waves have ebbed away from Gwyddno's weir, and left a broad stretch of marsh and meadow between it and the present coast, where stands the fishing village of Borth. The village fringes the sea-line with half a mile of straggling cottages; but the eye is caught at once by a massive building of white stone, standing at the head of the long street, and forming a landmark in the plain. This building is the Cambrian Hotel, reared on a scale that would suggest the neighbourhood of a populous health-resort. But the melancholy silence which haunts its doors is rarely broken, between season and season, by the presence of guests, unless it be some chance sportsman in quest of marsh-fowl, or a land-agent in quest of rents. When, therefore, on the 15th of March, 1876, a party of four visitors--the Rev. Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School, one of the Trustees of the school, and two of the masters--were seen mounting the steps of the porch, it was a sight to make the villagers wonder by what chance so many guests came to knock at the door in that dead season. Had the wind blown them hither? It blew a hurricane that day on the bleak coasts of Cardigan Bay; but it was a shrewder storm yet which had swept this windfall to the doors of Borth. The story must be briefly told. On November 2nd, 1875, Uppingham School was dispersed on account of a fever which had attacked both town and school, not without fatal casualties. On January 28th, 1876, the school met again. In the interval the school-houses had been put in complete sanitary order, and though the efforts made to amend the general drainage of the town had been only on a small and tentative scale, it was thought that the school, if secure on its own premises, might safely be recalled, in spite of remaining deficiencies outside those limits. But, _tua res agitur_--the term began with three weeks of watchful quiet, and then the blow fell again. A boy sickened of the same fever; then, after an interval of suspense, two or three fresh cases made it clear that this was no accident. An inspection of the town drainage, ordered by the authorities, revealed certain permanent sources of danger. It was clear that the interests of school and town, in matters of hygiene as in others, were not separable; perhaps the best fruit of the sequel has been the mutual conviction that those interests are one. Meanwhile the new illustration of this connection of interests had a formidable significance for the Uppingham masters. Men looked at one another as those do who do not like to give a name to their fears. For what could be done? The school could not be dismissed again. How many would return to a site twice declared untenable? But neither could it be kept on the spot: for there came in unmistakable evidence that, in that case, the school would dissolve itself, and that, perhaps, irrevocably, through the withdrawal of its scholars by their parents from the dreaded neighbourhood. Already the trickling had begun; something must be done before the banks broke, and the results and hopes of more than twenty long working years were poured out to waste. When the crisis was perceived, a project which had been already the unspoken thought in responsible quarters, but which would have sounded like a counsel of despair had the situation been less acute, was suddenly started in common talk and warmly entertained. Why should we not anticipate calamity by flight? Before the school melted away, and left us teaching empty benches, why should we not flit, master and scholar together, and preserve the school abroad for a securer future afterwards at home? In a space of time to be measured rather by hours than days, this project passed through the stages of conception, discussion, and resolve, to the first step in its execution. On Tuesday, March 7th, a notice was issued to parents and guardians that the school would break up that day week for a premature Easter holiday, and at the end of the usual three weeks reassemble in some other locality, of which nothing could as yet be specified except that it was to be healthier than that we were leaving. The proposed experiment--to transport a large public school from its native seat and all its appliances and plant to a strange site of which not even the name was yet known, except as one of several possible spots, and to do this at a few days' notice--was no doubt a novel one. But the resolve, if rapidly formed and daring, was none the less deliberate and sane. Its authors must not be charged either with panic or a passion for adventure. All the data of a judgment were in view, and delay could add no new fact, except one which would make any decision nugatory because too late. It was wisdom in those with whom lay the cast of the die, to take their determination while a school remained for which they could determine anything. It was a sharp remedy, however. For on the morrow of this resolve the owners of so many good houses, fields, and gardens, all the outward and visible of Uppingham School, became, for a term without assignable limit, landless and homeless men, and the Headmaster almost as much disburdened of his titular realm as if he were a bishop _in partibus_ or the chief of a nomad caravan. It was a sharp remedy; but those who submitted to it breathed the freer at having broken prison, and felt something, not indeed of the recklessness which inspires adventure, but of the elation which sustains it: Why now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark; The storm is up, and all is on the hazard! There was cited at this time a somewhat similar event in the history of Rugby School. Dr. Arnold, in a like emergency, had removed the school, or all who chose to go, in numerous detachments under the care severally of himself and others of his masters to various distant spots, among others his own house in the Lake country, where they spent some two months, and returned to Rugby when the danger was over. It was felt, however, that this incident furnished no real precedent for the present venture. What we were proposing was not to arrange a number of independent reading-parties in scattered country retreats. Such a plan would hardly have been practicable with a system in which, as in our case, the division of the school for teaching purposes has no reference to the division into boarding-houses. It was proposed to pluck up the school by the roots and transplant it bodily to strange soil; to take with us the entire body of masters, with, probably, their families, and every boy who was ready to follow; to provide teaching for the latter, not only without loss in the amount, but without interruption of the existing system in any branch; and to guarantee the supply of everything necessary for the corporate life of three hundred boys, who had to be housed, fed, taught, disciplined, and (not the easiest of tasks) amused, on a single spot, and one as bare of all the wonted appliances of public school life as that yet uncertain place was like to prove, of which the recommendation for our residence would be that no one else cared to reside there. CHAPTER II.--A CHARTER OF SETTLEMENT. _Habet populus Romanus ad quos gubernacula rei publicae deferat_: _qui ubicunque terrarum sunt_, _ibi omne est rei publicae praesidium_, _vel potius ipsa res publica_. CICERO. HAMLET. _Is not parchment made of sheep-skins_? HORATIO. _Ay_, _my lord, and of calf-skins too_. HAMLET. _They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that_. SHAKESPEARE. The Trustees of the School met at Uppingham on March 11th. This was the earliest opportunity of consulting them collectively on the resolution to break up the school and to migrate, which had been taken on the 7th. They sanctioned the breaking up of the school. On the question of its removal elsewhere they recorded no opinion. Meanwhile a reconnaissance was being made by one of our body, who was despatched to visit, as in a private capacity, Borth, and two or three other spots on the Welsh coasts, while inquiries were also made in other directions. On Monday, 13th, the Headmaster left Uppingham for a visit to the sites which promised most favourably. A deep snow on the ground made the departure from home seem the more cheerless, but it had melted from the Welsh hills before we reached them. On Tuesday, the party--which now consisted of the Headmaster, two of the staff, and one of the Trustees (whose services on this occasion, and many others arising out of it, we find it easier to remember than to acknowledge as they deserve)--stayed a night at the inland watering-place of Llandrindod, one of the suggested sites. The bleak moors round it were uninviting enough that squally March day. But the question of settling here was dismissed at once; there was not sufficient house-room in the place. So next morning we bore down upon Borth. The first sight of the place seemed to yield us assurance of having reached our goal. The hotel is a long oblong building with two slight retiring wings, beyond which extends a square walled enclosure of what was then green turf; Cambrian Terrace overlooks the enclosure at right angles to the hotel, the whole reminding us remotely of a college quadrangle. On entering the hotel, the eye seized on the straight roomy corridors which traverse it, and the wide solid staircase, as features of high strategic importance. A tour of the rooms was made at once, and an exact estimate taken of the possible number of beds. Besides two other members of the staff, who joined the pioneers at Borth, the school medical officer had come down to meet us, and reported on what lay within his province. Meanwhile two of the party were conducted by mine host to explore a "cricket-ground" close to the hotel, or at least a plot of ground to which adhered a fading tradition of a match between two local elevens. The "pitch" was conjecturally identified among some rough hillocks, over the sandy turf of which swept a wild northwester, "shrill, chill, with flakes of foam," and now and then a driving hailstorm across the shelterless plain. So little hospitable was our welcome to a home from which we were sometime to part not without regretful memories. Next day, March 16th, a contract was signed, which gave us the tenancy of the hotel till July 21st, with power to renew the contract at will for a further term after the summer holidays. Our landlord, Mr. C. Mytton, was to provide board (according to a specified dietary) and bed (at least bed- room) for all who could be lodged in his walls, and board (with light and firing) for the whole party; to supply the service for the kitchen, and to undertake the laundry. Servants for attendance on the boys were to be brought by the masters. The payment was to be 1 pound a head per week for all who were lodged and boarded, or boarded only, in the hotel. For washing, and one or two other matters, an extra charge was admitted. We have only to add that the bargain was one with which both parties, under their respective circumstances, had reason to be satisfied; and that the arrangement worked not more stiffly than could be expected where the large margin of the unforeseen left so much to subsequent interpretation. Even Dido and Hiarbas were not agreed about the precise width of a bull's- hide. We do not, however, wish it to be inferred from this classical parallel, that our settlers claim to have rivalled the adroitness of the Punic queen in her dealings with the barbarian prince: [Greek text] {12} CHAPTER III.--TRANSFORMATIONS. _Your snail is your only right house-builder_; _for he builds his house out of the stuff of his own vitals_, _and therefore wherever he travel he carries his own roof above him_. _But I have known men_, _spacious in the possession of bricks and mortar_, _who have not so much made their houses as their houses have made them_. _Turn such an one out of his home_, _and he is a bare_ "_O without a figure_," _counting for nothing in the sum of things_. _He only is truly himself who has nature in him_, _when the old shell is cracked_, _to build up a new one about him out of the pith and substance of himself_. Ten days after the reconnaissance described in the last chapter, the pioneers of the school were again upon the ground. On Monday, March 27th, a goods train of eighteen trucks, chartered by the Uppingham masters, was unloading three hundred bedsteads, with their bedding, on Borth platform. These were to be distributed among the quarters of their respective owners, in some dozen different houses, which we had engaged in addition to the hotel. The workmen were mostly Welshmen, anxious to be doing, but understanding imperfectly the speech of their employers. With the eagerness of their temperament, they went at the trucks, and Babel began. Amid a confused roar of contradictory exhortations, with energetic gesture, and faces full of animation and fire, they were hauling away, to any and every place, the ton-loads of mattresses, and the fragments of unnumbered bedsteads. It was time for the owners to interpose; and those of the school party who were present, knowing that time was very precious, and that example is better than precept, especially precept in a foreign language, put their own hands to the work, the Headmaster being foremost, and earned a labouring man's wage at unloading the trucks and carrying the goods to their billets. Some of our new acquaintances watched the scene with a shocked surprise that authorities should share in the manual labour, instead of looking on and paying for it. But their feelings at last determined to admiration. "Why, sirs," they exclaimed, "you get it done as if you were used to move every three weeks." But, in fact, there was so much to be done, and so few days to do it in, that the exigencies of the work spared neither age, sex, nor degree of our party. None were exempt, and those who were not employed in porterage and rough carpentry might be found shifting furniture, or stitching curtains, or jointing together bedsteads. Meanwhile, workmen in and round the hotel were as busy as stage-carpenters preparing a transformation scene. First, by the elimination of carpets and furniture, the interior was reduced to a _tabula rasa_. Then, in the somewhat weather-beaten top story, plastering and surface-washing went briskly on. Our hosts assured us no hands could be found for this work, but the Headmaster made a descent upon Aberystwith and returned with the required number. A contractor was fitting the large coffee-rooms, the billiard-room and others, and the ground-floor corridor from end to end, with long narrow tables--plain deal boards on wooden trestles--for the accommodation of three hundred diners. Outside, the stables were converted into the school carpentery, and the coach-house into a gymnasium. Above all, a wooden school-room, eighty-three feet by twenty, had been designed, and its site marked out on the north side of the enclosure behind the hotel. Then there was the care of providing supplementary house-room for many purposes: rooms for music practice, and for the boys' studies (of which we shall have more to say), and for hospital uses. Ordinary "sick-room" accommodation was soon obtained by paying for it, but a fever hospital was also a requirement which, with our experiences, we were not likely to forget, and this was less easy to secure. We had to scour the neighbourhood, knocking at the door of many a farmhouse and country homestead, before we were provided. The house-room being secured, came the labour of furnishing; the distribution of tables, benches, bookshelves, &c, for the class-rooms, and of furniture (in many cases a minimum) for the needs of masters and their families; the ticketing of the bed-room doors, the beds, the chests of drawers, and each drawer in them, with the name of the occupant--with many like minutiae, which it took longer to provide than it does to detail them. The task was not rendered easier by being shared in part with our hosts, who had hardly taken the measure of our requirements. It became necessary at the last moment to telegraph to the Potteries for a large consignment of bed-room ware, which, in spite of protestations, had been laid in only in half quantities. The world of school has marched forward since the days when three or four basins sufficed for the toilet of a dozen boys. While the elementary needs of the colony were being attended to, its more advanced wants were not neglected. There were those whom the anxiety of providing for the school amusements, and in particular its cricket, suffered not to sleep. We believe that the first piece of school property which arrived on the scene was the big roller from the cricket- field. Resolved to gather no moss in inglorious ease at home, it had mounted a North-Western truck, and travelled down to Bow Street station, where it was to disembark for action. It cost the Company's servants a long struggle to land it, but once again on terra firma it worked with a will and achieved wonders, reducing a piece of raw meadow land in a few weeks' space to a cricket-field which left little to be desired. This meadow lay within a few hundred yards of Bow Street station, four miles by rail from Borth. It is the property of Sir Pryse Pryse, of Gogerddan, who gave the school the use of it at a peppercorn rent. This was but one of the many acts of unreserved generosity shown by this gentleman to the school. It is not often that the opportunity offers of winning so much and such hearty gratitude as our neighbour of Gogerddan has won by his prompt liberality; still less often is the opportunity occupied with such thoughtful and ungrudging kindness. We had help in the same kind from the Bishop of St. David's, who put at our service a field close to the hotel; a rather wild one, but in which little plots and patches for a practising wicket were discovered by our experts. The firm sands to the north were reported to yield an excellent "wicket;" with the serious deduction, however, that the pitch was worn out and needed to be changed every half-dozen balls. Among such cares the week rolled away only too speedily, and brought the day of the school's arrival upon us. If we have failed, as we have, to convey a true impression of the serious labour and anxieties which crowded its hours, we will quote the summary of a writer who described it at the time, and knew what he was describing: "It was like shaking the alphabet in a bag, and bringing out the letters into words and sentences; such was the sense of absolute confusion turned into intelligent shape." {19} CHAPTER IV. _Gesta ducis celebro_, _Rutulis qui primus ab oris_ _Cambriae_, _odoratu profugus_, _Borthonia venit_ _Litora_; _multum ille et sanis vexatus et aegris_, _Vi Superum_, _quibus haud curae gravis aura mephitis_: _Multa quoque et loculo passus_, _dum conderet urbem_ _Inferretque deos Cymris_. AN EPIC FRAGMENT. [Greek text]. The careful general who has completed his disposition without one discoverable flaw, who has foreseen all emergencies, and anticipated every possible combination, may await the action with a certain moral confidence of success. But he would be a man of no human fibre, were he not to feel some disquiet in his inmost soul when he gets upon horseback with his enemy in sight, and listens for the boom of the first gun. Not very different, except for the absence of a like confidence in the completeness of their dispositions, were the emotions of the masters who manned the platform of Borth Station, when the gray afternoon of Tuesday, April 4th, drew sombrely towards its close. The station was crowded with spectators from Aberystwith and Borth itself, curious to watch the entry of the boys. Expectation was stimulated by the arrival of a train, which set all the crowd on tip-toe, and then swept through the station--a mere goods train. Half an hour's longer waiting, and the right train drew up, and discharged Uppingham School on the remote Welsh platform. It struck a spark of home feeling in the midst of the lonely landscape, and the chill of strange surroundings, to see well-known faces at the windows, and to meet the grasp of familiar hands. But there was no time for sentiment that stirring evening. The station was cleared with all speed of boys and spectators, the former turning in to tea at those endless tables, the latter strolling away to carry home their first impressions of their invaders. Then one group of masters and servants set to work to sort the luggage which cumbered the platform, while others received it at the hotel door, and distributed it to the various billets. Light was scant, hands were not too numerous, and the work was not done without some confusion. But it was done; and the tired workers went to their beds, thankful for what was finished, and full of good hopes for the work which was yet to be begun. And the boys--how did they feel? As they stepped out from the railway carriage into those bare, vasty corridors and curtainless dormitories, did some little sense of desolateness in the new prospect temper its excitement? Did some homesickness arise in the exile as he pondered on the retirement and comfort of the "house" at Uppingham, and his individual ownership of the separate cubicle, and the study which was "his castle?" He was a unit now, not of a household, but of a camp. Small blame to him if life seemed to have lost its landmarks, and things round him to be "all nohow," as he sat down in some bare hall upon a schoolfellow's book-box (wondering whether he should ever see his own), to while away with a story-book the listless interval before bed-time, under the niggard light of a smoking lamp, or a candle flickering in the draught. What exactly he felt or thought, however, we do not pretend to know. We only know that there was not one of them but felt proud to be out campaigning with his school, and would have counted "ten years of peaceful life" not more than worth his share in that honourable venture. There was no work for them next morning (their masters were busy enough providing for the physical needs of the colony), and they were free to explore their new country, to ramble up the headlands or along the margin of the marsh. The arrivals of last night were but the first instalment of the school, about half the number. The same train brought in a new freight this evening, and the scene on the platform was similar, but more tranquil. By a special train after midnight came in a few more from the most distant homes, and the muster was complete. The number, two hundred and ninety, fell but slightly below the full complement of the school. Putting out of account the names of those who would in any case have left the school that Easter, no more than three, we believe, failed to follow us down to Borth. So unanimous an adhesion of the school to its leaders no one had been sanguine enough to reckon on. It increased no doubt at the moment the difficulties of making provision, but withal it made the task better worth the effort. Next morning the school was called together, and the Headmaster addressed them, feeling, perhaps, somewhat like a general publishing a manifesto to his troops before a campaign. It was a great experiment, he said, in which they were sharing; let them do their best to make the result a happy one for themselves, and for the people among whom they had come. They were "making history," for this experience was a wholly new one, which might not impossibly prove helpful some day to others in like circumstances. It is pleasant to record that the appeal was not wasted. At the dinner-hour to-day, the full numbers being now on the spot, the resources of the commissariat were put to the test. Some anxiety was relieved when the supply proved sufficient; it would have been small cause for reproach if the caterers had failed in their estimate on the first experiment. But of the commissariat we shall say more presently. The secondary necessities of life, fire and light, were not forthcoming with quite the same promptness. There was a twilight period in many houses before lamps were furnished in sufficient abundance. The place of fuel was supplied by the genial weather of the first week; and perhaps few were aware of what we were doing without. Next week the east winds and the coal arrived together. The hotel laundry found the task it had undertaken beyond its strength. No wonder. Three hundred sets of _articles de linge_ reach a figure of which our hosts had hardly grasped the significance. We are sometimes told that Gaels and Cymry cannot count. At any rate, when the bales of linen came pouring in upon them, heaping every table and piling all the floor, and still flowing in faster than room could be found, the laundresses, brave workers though they were, felt that the game was lost: They stand in pause where they should first begin, And all neglect. One poor nymph was discovered by a compassionate visitor dissolved in tears over her wash-tub. Such misery could not be permitted; and we transferred half the task at once to the laundries of Aberystwith. On the afternoon of this day took place the distribution of "studies." That is to say, some sixty or eighty boys (a number more than doubled afterwards), in order to relieve the pressure on our sitting-rooms, were billeted upon some of the village people, who let their rooms for the purpose. From two to six boys were assigned to each room according to its capacity. We shall speak again of these studies. Here we will only pause to thank our good landladies for the intrepidity with which they threw their doors open to the invasion, the more so as they mostly claimed to belong to the category of "poor widows"--a qualification upon which they were disposed to set a price in arranging their charges. Their daring proved no indiscretion. The writer, who has the honour of knowing them all, was the depositary of many and emphatic testimonies on their part to the cordial relations between them and "the children." This endearing term was exchanged for another by one good old lady, who appealed to him against the "very wicked boys," whom she charged with having "foolished" her. The complication traced to ignorance of one another's speech (the boys spoke no Welsh, and she would have done more wisely to speak no English), and a _modus vivendi_ was easily restored. Poor soul! she took a pathetic farewell of them when their sojourn ended: "They must forgive her for having a quick temper; she had had much trouble; her husband and four sons had gone down at sea." On Friday came a piece of cheering news. Some sympathisers were intending to appeal to parents of boys in the school for subscriptions to a fund, which should help to defray the expense incurred by the masters in moving and resettling the school. The appeal met with a liberal response in many quarters; a large sum was raised, though from a number of subscribers smaller than the promoters of the fund expected. Men, who were feeling the double pressure at once of keen and novel cares, and of an outlay already large, which no one could see to the end of, will not forget that well-timed succour. Not least will it be remembered as a "material guarantee" that the subscribers believed the cause they aided to be worth a costly effort to save. The week closed with an old scene on a new stage--a football match on Sir Pryse's field at Bow Street. It was the last of the house-matches, which had been interrupted at Uppingham to be played out here. The sight of the school swarming into the railway carriages, which carried us to the four-mile-distant ground, and then the mimic war of the red and white jerseys contrasting the gray Gogerddan woodlands which overhang the meadow, and the shouts of the English boys blending with the excited but unintelligible cries of the Welsh rustic children, who were rapt spectators of the game, brought home to us the piquant contrast between our unchanged school habits and the novelty of their framework. The weather of this first week was dry and genial; and it had no pleasanter moments than those spent on the beach at sunset, whither the school flocked down after tea for half an hour's leisure in the after- glow. There is plenty of amusement for them on this broad reach of sand and shingle. Some are groping for shells or for pebbles, which the lapidary will transform for a trifle into dazzling jewels; others are playing ducks and drakes on the waves, or entertaining themselves like Prospero's elves, That on the sands, with printless feet, Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back again. More pensive spirits saunter up and down the grassy terrace which overlooks the beach, and watch the shifting line of dark figures seen against the white wall of the breaker, or note the fugitive tints on the dimpling surface of the water, or the wet margin of the tide. A group of villagers is clustered round the water-fountain a few yards away; the children chatter about us as they fill their pitchers; and the old women, creeping homewards, cast a glance under their bonnets at the boys, and exchange muttered comments with their gossips. Soon the cliffs of the southern headland grow duskier and more remote; the sea fades to a cold uniform gray; the colours of the brown twilight marsh and the violet hills are lost in one another; and so, with a refreshing breath of idyllic peacefulness, the stirring week came to an end. "Its evening closed on a quiet scene of school routine, as if doubt and risk, turmoil and confusion and fear, weary head and weary hand, had not been known in the place. The wrestling-match against time was over, and happy dreams came down on Uppingham by the Sea." CHAPTER V.--THE NEW COUNTRY. _All places that the eye of Heaven visits_, _Are to a wise man ports and happy havens_. RICHARD II. The primitive man, after he has satisfied the claims of appetite, stitched his skin-mantle, and thatched a hut, may begin to spare time for reflection on the quality and flavour of the prey he has eaten, or the picturesqueness of his cabin. Till then his estimate of things is quantitative. He asks not of what sort his food is, but whether there is enough of it, and regards less the cut of his coat than its thickness. The analogy of our circumstances must be our excuse for postponing so long a description of our new settlement, its physical surroundings, and the complexion of our domestic and social life. Not in truth that we had returned to barbarism: but who could dilate on the beauty of mountain scenery, in sight of which he was perhaps to starve; who would criticise the pattern of his dinner-service, or be fastidious in carpets and wall- paper, before he could reckon upon dinner, or call shelter his own? But a week is over, and we have all settled into our berths. The boys have found that there will be dinner every day; the masters that no one will have to pitch his tent on a sand-dune, or spread a straw litter in a bathing-machine. The level of comfort was, of course, not uniform. How should it be? Probably there is a choice of corners in a workhouse or casual-ward. Some of our party tasted the painful pleasures of the poor in the scant accommodation and naked simplicity of cottage lodgings. It was long after our arrival that we discovered a valued friend still sitting on the corner of his packing-case, and brewing his coffee on a washhand-stand. The fire smoked all day; but this vice in the apartment was neutralised by a broken window. Yet he should be quite happy, he said, if he could get a glazier _and_ a sweep (like smoke and draught, one would not do without the other), a bolster, an occasional clean towel, and a little warm water in the morning. Those who had brought a family with them into camp were more seriously troubled with the cares of providing quarters, and pondered regretfully on the peace and roominess of home. Still as we are leaving no one houseless or dinnerless, we may turn aside to describe at more leisure the place we lived in and the manner of our life. The stage on which our little history was enacted is a maritime plain of irregular semicircular shape, with a sea-front of five miles, and a depth inland of from two to three miles. This plain, a dead level stretch of peat, of which part is coming under cultivation, while part is still marsh, is surrounded by a ring of hills, which rise in successive well- defined ranges of increasing height, till they culminate in the summits of Cader Idris on one side and Plinlimmon on the other. The River Dovey, which cleaves the circle of mountains, flows in a broad estuary along the base of the northward hills, under which, at the mouths of the estuary, lies the little port of Aberdovey. At the other end of the arc formed by the coastline, close under the slopes of the promontory which closes the plain at its north-west corner, stands the village of Borth, three-quarters of a mile of straggling dwellings, which vary in scale and character from the primitive mud-cabin of the squatter to the stately hotel which formed the headquarters of the school. The little town is irregular even to quaintness, without being picturesque. Its houses are not grouped according to size and character, but dropped as it were anyhow, in chance collocations, tall and low, thatched and slated together. Two or three gigantesque meeting-houses, featureless and sombre, domineer over the roofs around them. One or two others of a less puritan design, and not out of character with the church on a knoll a furlong off, compensate their severer rivals. The shape of the village is determined by the narrow ridge of terra firma, the mere heaping of the tides, between the quaking marsh and the encroaching sea. The nidus of the present settlement is the tiny hamlet of Old Borth, perched on a spur of the promontory, and well out of reach of flood tides. We are not sure that the mother may not outlive her colony, unless substantial measures are taken to guard against another 30th of January. Near Old Borth, through a gap in the hills, comes the River Lery, a trout-stream known to our anglers, thanks again to Sir Pryse who owns it. It races bubbling round the furze-clad knoll, whose Welsh name is translated Otter's Island, on which stands the church, and then is silenced in a blank straight-cut channel, which conveys it through the marsh into the estuary at Ynyslas. Up the gorge of the Lery runs the railway, which carried us so often past the massive church and steep pine-grown graveyard of Langfihangel-geneur-glyn, and across the broad meadows of Bow Street, to the civilisation of Aberystwith. For Aberystwith was our Capua, and used to draw large parties on many a blank afternoon for marketing or amusement. Then there was the beach, four miles of it, from the rocks of Borth Head, where the waves could be watched breaking on the seaweed-covered reef, and sending up columns of white spray against the black face of the cliffs, away to the yellow sand dunes near the Dovey's mouth, and the reaches of wet sands where we noted on summer days "the landscape winking through the heat," almost with the effect of a mirage. These sands, firm and sound under foot, were a famous walking-ground at all times; but they changed their character very much with the seasons; at one time retreating and laying bare a beach of shingle under the pebble ridge; at another, swinging back to cover them up again. In the former state of the shore a suggestive phenomenon might be observed. At low-water mark there appeared certain dark shapeless lumps, which might be taken for rocks at a distance, but were in fact the roots and stumps of a submerged pine-forest. Remains of the same forest are found in the marsh. Wood can be cut from the buried trunks, looking as fresh in fibre as if the tree still grew. Here is the verification of the legend (or is it, perhaps, the suggestion of it?) which records the fate of the Lost Lowland Hundred. Once on a time (the Cymric bards answer for it), a flourishing tract of country stretched at the foot of the hills which are now washed by the tides of Cardigan Bay. The fishermen of Borth, as they creep past the headlands in their fishing-smacks, have seen deep down in the clear waters, the firmly-cemented stones of a causeway, which must once have traversed the plain, and the line of which may be not indistinctly descried stretching far out to seaward from the mouth of a little combe. It is true that geologists whom we have consulted ridicule the fancy of masonry offering such resistance to the tides, and explain it away as a pebble-ridge built up by the action of currents. And perhaps we might mention in this connection, that one of our party, on the first view, was half persuaded he had seen a sea-serpent. Well, this prosperous country, defended against the sea by embankments, was during the heroic age of Wales laid under water by the opening of the sluices in a drunken frolic. A fragment of it, the marsh between the pebble-ridge of Borth and the hills, would seem to have been recovered; but it enjoys a precarious safety, and even within our experience the sea gave a meaning threat of claiming his own again. But that is a story which must be told in its own place. Such then were the geographical details of the spot in which we had settled, and they made up a landscape, which, if it can be more than rivalled in other parts of the Principality, has yet a characteristic and impressive beauty. The following extract may serve, for lack of a better rendering, to describe how the scene looked to the eyes of someone who watched it on a June afternoon from the grassy slopes of Borth Head: My eyes run on with the tide which drifts inland up the estuary, and, farther than vision can really follow, track the march of its glancing ripples, as they swim on past shoal and sand-dune and morass up to the dewy gates of the Spring, in among green-clad river meadows and crisp close-skirted woodlands which the salt breath of sea-winds restrains from a richer luxuriance, on past springing knolls plumed with dark firs, and dimpling valleys mellow with the contrasted gold of the oak's young leafage. Above these, hills moulded on a grander scale heave up their broad shoulders to the sunlight, which is reflected in pale but tender hues of blue or violet or rose from their bare rock masses, or the slopes hardly less bare, which are swept by great winds, and browsed yet closer by climbing mountain sheep. At this and the other point the bosses of the hills are lighted with the sparkle of gorse-thickets, or dusky with heather not yet kindled into bloom. Lower down there are belts of woodland, fencing off the pastures which strew the lowest terraces of the mountains from the barren wastes above them, and these pastures are brightly flecked with patches of white-walled homesteads down to the brown edge of the marsh. And so, ridge after ridge, the hills enclose the scene in a half-circle, of which this breezy headland, our "specular mount," is an extreme horn. But what the eye reposes on at last is the broad floor of marsh-land between mountain and sea. A broad smooth floor, which would be vacant and dull enough had not Nature taken thought to drape its formlessness the more lovingly and richly. She has unrolled on it a carpet of various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and shaggy with bristling reeds. It is a wilderness, but not unrelieved with here and there an oasis, where, like islands left high and dry in a deserted ocean bed, one and another rocky knoll lift up above the waste flats around them some acres of sweet grass, or a broad field of flowering mustard, shining with a splendour as of cloth of gold, and fringed with a loop or two of silver braid by the river winding at the base. There is animate life, too, sprinkled not stintedly over its surface, not only of visitant sea-fowl from the shore, or solitude- loving creatures native to the place--plover and duck and long-winged herons, but also of cattle and horses grazing on the cultivated edges of the marsh, which make us look for the homes of their human masters at no great distance. Why there they are, lying overlooked at our feet all the while, a straggle of lowly white-roofed dwellings clinging to the long pebble ridge like barnacles on a rock, breathing a thin smoke from their scattered chimneys, whence the blessed smell of peat-fires is wafted through the dry air to our nostrils. But one great house I notice with a crowd about its door-steps, and a flag waving over them a device I have somewhere seen before, where the kitchen chimney smokes with a most hospitable volume; guests must be plenty there. Yes; and if further signs of life be needed, you may listen to the puff of a farmer's steam-engine planted in the swamp, and see the glitter of the steel ropes, with which it draws its ploughshares, resistless as fate, through the oozy fallows. Well, if it is come to this, the farmers and their engines will soon civilise away the beauty of this romantic wild. But shall we complain? If they have begun to drain these intractable marshes, then there is a chance for other places, where the interest on the cost of drainage will be less problematical than here. CHAPTER VI.--MAKESHIFTS. [Greek text]. From our chapter on the geographical features of our settlement we pass on to describe how the settlers were housed and organised. If a school be an institution for teaching purposes, its school-room and class-rooms should be the most essential portion of its plant. Without discussing the adequacy of the definition, we will begin with these. We were not ill provided; with an exception or two, the rooms appropriated for class-rooms answered the purpose well. Some of them were spacious; the rest were large enough for the wants of the classes, limited to an average of twenty. Nor would a Government Inspector have justly measured this adequacy by the "cubic capacity," if he failed to take into account the exhilarating five minutes' breathing time upon the beach, at eleven o'clock. There was a rare pleasure in those moments of escape from Greek verbs to the sparkle of the tide and the scent of the sea breeze. What Germans call the "real" subjects, were also provided for. The modern languages were taught mostly in the class-rooms of the classical masters. Music took up her quarters in several scattered dwellings. Wales is the home of song, and our musicians were very welcome to make the cottage walls resound to violin or key-board. We remember well the affectionate reverence with which one aged custodian spoke of the "pianass" she was proud to house; she cherished them as if they had been tame elephants. Several concerts were given during our stay--but in the Assembly Rooms of Aberystwith; our wooden school-room was found, on the first experiment, unfit for the purpose, from the want of resonance. The makeshift gymnasium and carpentery, in the stables and coach-house, have been mentioned before. If among "real studies" we may include the cricket, this was,
{'title': 'Uppingham by the Sea: A Narrative of the Year at Borth by John Huntley Skrine', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}