Uppingham by the Sea

Uppingham by the Sea

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Uppingham by the Sea, by John Henry
Skrine
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Title: Uppingham by the Sea a Narrative of the Year at Borth
Author: John Henry Skrine

Release Date: March 22, 2006 [eBook #18036]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
UPPINGHAM BY THE SEA***

Transcribed from the 1878 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

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