id="pgepubid00012"/>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 publicæ deferat: qui ubicunque terrarum sunt, ibi omne est rei publicæ præsidium, 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