Uppingham by the Sea: A Narrative of the Year at Borth

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es of our settlement we pass on to describe

o, the rooms appropriated for class-rooms answered the purpose well. Some of them were spacious; the rest were large enough for the wants of the classes, limited to an average of twenty. Nor would a Government Inspector have justly measured this adequacy by the

r well the affectionate reverence with which one aged custodian spoke of the "pianass" she was proud to house; she cherished them as if they had been tame elephants. Several concerts were given during our stay-but in the Assembly Rooms of Aberystwith; our wooden school-room was found, on the first experiment, unfit for the purpose, from

clares that "a boy's study is his castle," and confers upon him what Aristotle calls the "unspeakable" delight of the "sense of private property." At Borth this could not be. In very rare cases was a room the one and indivisible belonging of a single owner; often as many as six shared the table and fireplace. Some of these tenements had at least the less solid merit of looking picturesque. Peeping into a Welsh interior, with its stone kitchen-floor, polished wainscoting, and oak furniture, its walls hung with German prints

s it "a queer new feeling to do the old work in a strange place, to miss the accustomed pictures on the walls, the accustomed column of books rising on either hand-even the familiar table-cloth and carpet, and to sit instead inside the framework of a six-foot bed, with roof and walls forming the queerest possible combinations of lines and angles, and hung with three different patterns of paper." To woo the muses in a garret is the common fate of genius; but most of the "students" (for so their landladies, misled by a name, called the occupants of a study)

in reach, and ranged along the beach. Let one machine be assigned to each boy, and let them be filled up with book-shelves, table, chairs, &c. Thus the whole difficulty will be solved in a moment. And the plan has this further advantage, that whe