oly worship. It _is_ a
pleasant spot to look on, and you made your old picturesque street very
beautiful with your decorations and that bright outbreak of welcome which
greeted us as we came in. (Cheers.) The school hardly knew what we
meant--they did not know when we asked them to cheer at the top of the
hill; but as the stream of life wound round and came in sight of that
avenue of arches and flags, then they understood what was meant, and they
were ready enough to second it. (Cheers.) We were very thankful, also,
that you recognise in that address--that able address and pleasing to
receive--how hard it was to go, how great a risk had to be faced to save
the school; for that was what was at stake. I do not say that in years
to come there should not again have been a school as great as this, or
greater; but this I am sure of, that we were in the very last week of the
life of this present school; that at the beginning of the week, when it
was decided to go, there was news from different quarters that made it
absolutely certain that another Monday would have seen no school here.
For a school is not a mere machine which can be set going to order, and
which anybody who happens at the time to have the mastery of can deal
with like a machine. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," says
Shakespeare in one of his plays; and the rejoinder comes, "Why, so can I,
or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?"
(Laughter and cheers.) Now that is just what they won't do; and we
simply had no choice; we lay absolutely helpless before the fact that
ruin stared us in the face, and we could not stir hand or foot to stop it
unless we had been able then to find a door of escape. This present
school was at an end, and neither I nor some others amongst us could have
set foot again in Uppingham as our home. Now I do assure you ruin is a
hard thing to look on after a life-work of many years of labour--not a
less hard thing because the sun rose as usual, and it was all peace, and
the buildings looked as of old, and the fields were just as they had
always been; but an invisible barrier had risen up, and we had no place
here any more. To see the four-and-twenty years of life go at a
touch--indeed it was hard to think of. "For my part, I have built my
heart in the courses of the wall"--(cheers)--and nothing short of this
impelled us to that dire necessity of leaping in the dark, to go we did
not know where, and whe