"Long chamber" is long enough to contain nearly the whole of the
collegers, or boys on the foundation, whose complement I conjecture to
be about seventy. This is a region of which I can give but an
uncertain description, for few "Oppidans" cared to venture in. When I
did, it was to be tossed in a blanket, so that, though elevated, my
survey was hasty and superficial; but I suspect that the entire
furniture to which a colleger lays claim, is his bed and bureau,
tables and chairs being here as much out of keeping (if they could be
kept at all) as at Stonehenge. _En passant_--this tossing was a
pastime replete with the sublime and awful. That their efforts might
be simultaneous, those who held the blanket, and they were legion,
made use of the following neat hexameter:
"Ibis ab excusso, missus ab astra, sago."
And you go with a vengeance. "You shall fly from the quivering
blanket, despatched to the stars." The suspense was fearful while
awaiting the utterance of the ultimate syllable--how perfectly and
permanently have I acquired this pithy verse!
The floor is polished once a year on Election Friday, by "rug-riding."
This is accomplished by rolling a fellow up in a counterpane, here
properly called a rug. To either end of him is attached a rope, to
which five or six boys are harnessed. The floor is now well smeared
with tallow-grease, over which the warm mummy, rendered still hotter
by friction, is now drawn with delightful velocity. The polish thus
obtained is admirable, and but the slightest flavour of grease lingers
until the ensuing election.
The suburbs form a small town, composed of a few large and
indispensable shops, together with the houses of the masters and
dames, at whose houses the boys, not on the foundation, and who are
denominated "oppidans," board and lodge.
"The playing-fields" are very extensive, and subdivided into the
playing-fields, "upper-shooting-fields," and "lower-shooting-fields."
The two latter are separated from the former by "poet's-walk," a
lovely little peninsula, with an avenue of lime-trees running through
its entire length.
The shooting-fields are appropriated solely to cricket, and in winter
are "out of bounds." The playing-fields are open for foot-ball in the
winter, and for fighting all the year round. The whole is most
beautifully situated on the banks of the Thames, with the Little Park
and Windsor Castle on the opposite side. In addition, it is lined and
studded with the stateliest and most gigantic elms in England.
These three divisions, the school-yard, suburbs, and playing-fields,
form in theory "the bounds," which in practice are boundless, an
Etonian's movements being curbed by time, rather than by space.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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