Uppingham by the Sea | Page 7

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