" so the inmates of
the floor were summoned from their beds in the small hours to spend the
rest of the night in a bivouack on the ground-floor. One or another of
those luckless youngsters will, in after days, remember, as a cheerful
incident, the arrival on the scene of the Headmaster, with a store of
biscuits and such supplies as could be requisitioned at the moment, to
provision the watch. Your schoolboy, he reflected, is hungry at all
times; what must he be at night when dragged from bed to save his life,
and forced to sit up, rather cold and very empty, for several hours
before daybreak. Solaced, however, by these beguilements, the hours
passed cheerfully away.

CHAPTER XII.--FAREWELL.

_The primal sympathy_,
_Which_, _having been_, _must ever be_.

WORDSWORTH.

Thenceforward the weeks rolled smoothly on, unmarked by moving incident,
till they gladdened us with the growing light of spring, and brought us
within near sight of our home. Must the truth be told? We are all of us
loyal sons of Uppingham, but not all of us were glad to find our return
to the mother-country was at last arriving. So far away from the
offence, we need not fear attainder if we confess, some few of us, that
our hearts were not whole in their welcome of the long-deferred event. It
belonged to the irony that waits on all lives which are not too dull a
material for fortune's jests, that we should cease to desire our home
just when long patience and often-thwarted efforts, and

The slow, sad hours which bring us all things ill,
And all good things from evil,

had brought its coveted security at last within our reach. For so it was
with some of us. Perhaps the air of sea and mountain had got into the
blood, and infected it with a certain disrelish for the restraints, the
even decorum, and the tamer surroundings of our life in the Midlands.
Well, we are not the only emigrants who have preferred their backwoods to
the streets of the mother city, nor the first campaigners who have come
back to home-quarters a trifle spoiled by adventure. And, moreover,
while everything about us was a reminder of what we must forego, there
was nothing to tell us of what a greeting our townsmen were preparing for
us, or of the solid mutual good which filled the vista beyond that
auspicious welcome.

However, alike for those who were impatient and those who were half
reluctant to attain it, the equal-handed hours brought the