their valediction. When these
arrived, a deputation of the villagers moved into the school-room shed,
and there presented a brief address, which ran thus: "We, the inhabitants
of Borth, beg to tender our most sincere thanks to Dr. Thring, and all
the masters and scholars of the celebrated Uppingham School, for the very
many generous acts and kindly feelings exhibited to us during their
sojourn here." The address was introduced and explained by speeches
marked by refined feeling, and delivered with a noticeable grace of
manner. We will here cite, though for another reason, a few words of the
speaker who moved the address; he commented on the discipline which (from
the evidence of their conduct when at large) seemed to rule the school;
naively but pointedly he noted that no offence had ever been given; "No
boy had laughed at the villagers, if they were old and queer-looking or
queerly dressed; there had been no disorder, no shabby act, nothing
_un_decent" (so he put it in his unpractised English) "during the whole
twelve months we had spent among them." We give his testimony without
note or comment, sure that the facts would not be better told in words
less simple. They were little things he witnessed to; was it a little
thing that the witness could be truly borne?

The boys were not present to hear the speeches, but they will like well
to remember the scene without doors at that unlooked-for reunion of
school and village. It was a scene made up of homely elements enough,
but somehow, in our own memory at least, few pictures will remain printed
in such fast colours. Clearly, as on that evening, we shall always see,
distinct in the quiet light of the afterglow, the ranks of serious faces,
touched and stilled by the surprise of a contagious sympathy, as English
boys and Welsh cottagers looked each other in the face, and felt, if for
the space of a few heartbeats only, an outflash of that ancient kinship
which binds man and man together more than race and circumstance divide.

It pleases the smaller kind of criticism to cheapen the meaning of such
incidents as this, and explain them by the easy reference to interested
and conventional motives. Wiser men will take occasion to rejoice that
human nature is after all so kind; and if this be error, we would rather
err with the wise. Take once again our thanks, kind people of Borth, if
our thanks are worth your taking. You showed us no little kindness in a
strange land,