Uppingham by the Sea: A Narrative of the Year at BorthSkrine, John Huntley
History
Uppingham by the Sea: A Narrative of the Year at Borth
Skrine, John Huntley
Uppingham School
clinging to the long pebble ridge like barnacles on a rock, breathing
a thin smoke from their scattered chimneys, whence the blessed smell
of peat-fires is wafted through the dry air to our nostrils. But one
great house I notice with a crowd about its door-steps, and a flag
waving over them a device I have somewhere seen before, where the
kitchen chimney smokes with a most hospitable volume; guests must be
plenty there. Yes; and if further signs of life be needed, you may
listen to the puff of a farmer's steam-engine planted in the swamp,
and see the glitter of the steel ropes, with which it draws its
ploughshares, resistless as fate, through the oozy fallows. Well, if
it is come to this, the farmers and their engines will soon civilise
away the beauty of this romantic wild. But shall we complain? If
they have begun to drain these intractable marshes, then there is a
chance for other places, where the interest on the cost of drainage
will be less problematical than here.
CHAPTER VI.--MAKESHIFTS.
[Greek text].
From our chapter on the geographical features of our settlement we pass
on to describe how the settlers were housed and organised.
If a school be an institution for teaching purposes, its school-room and
class-rooms should be the most essential portion of its plant. Without
discussing the adequacy of the definition, we will begin with these. We
were not ill provided; with an exception or two, 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 "cubic capacity," if he failed to take into account
the exhilarating five minutes' breathing time upon the beach, at eleven
o'clock. There was a rare pleasure in those moments of escape from Greek
verbs to the sparkle of the tide and the scent of the sea breeze.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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