no other to-night; but our good hostess, we know, will give the youngsters tea, put them to bed, and forward them prepaid next morning. At length the last station has poured in its tributary to the volume of the returning multitude, and the train glides softly on between the brimming estuary and the marsh golden with sunset. The full stream is peaceably disgorged again through the narrow station-door, and distributes itself along the tea-tables. Sleep comes down upon tired limbs and easy consciences, and the day's glory throws the rich shadows of some Midsummer Night's Dream far into the bright dawn of another working day. It was never professed that on these occasions we were doing other than taking a holiday. If, together with mountain air and the scent of heather, a boy drank in a love and understanding of Nature, and felt, possibly for the first time, the inspiration of beauty, then probably hours were never spent in a class-room to more profit than were these on the slopes of Cader or Plinlimmon, or along the banks of Mowddy. CHAPTER IX.--THE FIRST TERM: MAKING HISTORY. "_Happy is the people which has no history_." _Stands this too among the beatitudes_? _Surely this were a fit evangel only for sheep and oxen_, _or for such human kine as covet the fat pastures rather than the high places of existence_. _For whoso is ill-content to live long and see good days_, _save he may also live much and see great days_, _will not be so tamely gospelled_, _seeing that every past is mother of a future_, _and that there is no history but is a prophecy as well_. In our late digression on the conditions and circumstances of our life at Borth, we have somewhat anticipated the narrative of events. But it was a plan agreeable to the facts of the case, that narrative should pass into description at the point where the stream of our little history, after descending the rapid of alarms and difficulties, abrupt resolves and swift action, fell quietly again into the smooth channel of a new routine. Not that the story of the succeeding months was really uneventful. If our readers suppose that from this point onward we led a prosperous untroubled existence, it will be due to the illusion, which, in fiction, makes us cheerful over the woes of the struggling hero, because we have glanced at the end of the book, and view the present trouble in the light of the successful issue: what the end would be we did not know, nor when it would come. And if, to resume our metaphor, the current of the enterprise flowed for the most part smoothly, there were rocks underneath which those who saw them could not forget, though they seldom raised an eddy on the surface. Here, however, we must ask the reader to believe us that it was so, without demanding explanations, which at this date would be inconvenient. We will go on then to notice the chief incidents of the term.