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proof that, though my laziness may have made me exacting, my exactions were not brutal. On the 15th of June, 1871, Harrow School celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of its foundation. Harrovians came from every corner of the globe to take part in this Tercentenary Festival. The arrangements were elaborated with the most anxious care. The Duke of Abercorn, affectionately and appropriately nicknamed "Old Splendid," presided over a banquet in the School-Yard; and the programme of the day's proceedings had announced, rather to the terror of intending visitors, that after luncheon there would be "speeches, interspersed with songs, from three hundred and fifty of the boys." The abolition of the second comma dispelled the dreadful vision of three-hundred-and-fifty school-boy-speeches, and all went merry as a marriage-bell--all, except the weather. It seemed as if the accumulated rain of three centuries were discharged on the devoted Hill. It was raining when we went to the early celebration in the Chapel; it was raining harder when we came out. At the culminating moment of the day's proceedings, when Dr. Vaughan was proposing "Prosperity to Harrow," the downpour and the thunder drowned the speaker's voice; and, when evening fell on the sodden cricket-ground, the rain extinguished the fireworks. On that same cricket-ground nine days later, in the golden afternoon of Midsummer Day, George Clement Cottrell, a boy beautiful alike in face and in character, was killed in an instant by a blow from a ball, which struck him behind the ear when he was umpiring in the Sixth Form game. On the 29th of June his five hundred school-fellows followed him to his resting-place in the Churchyard on the Hill, and I believe we unanimously felt that he whom we had lost was the one, of all our number, of whom we could say, with the surest confidence, that he was fit to pass, without a moment's warning, into the invisible World. _Beati mundo corde_. FOOTNOTES: [4] Writing to John Murray in 1832, Byron said--"There is a spot in the Churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the Hill looking towards Windsor, and a tomb under a large tree (bearing the name of Peachie, or Peachey), where I used to sit for hours and hours as a boy: this was my favourite spot." [5] The Rev. E. M. Young. [6] Herga is the Anglo-Saxon name of Harrow. [7] Charlotte Seymour, Countess Spencer, died 1903. [8] The name is borrowed from "Sybil." The be
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