A scurry for a seat on the omnibus or a tramp uphill, and we find ourselves abruptly in the village street. Then did each page as I turned it over bring some fresh recollection of one's unspeakable sense of newness and desolation; the haunting fear of doing something ludicrous; the morbid dread of chaff and of being "greened," which even in my time had, happily, supplanted the old terrors of being tossed in a blanket or roasted at a fire. Even less, I venture to think, was one thrilled by the heroic ambitions, the magnificent visions of struggle and success, which stir the heroes of schoolboy novels on the day of their arrival.
Here was a view of the School Library, with its patch of greensward separating it from the dust and traffic of the road. There was the Old School with its Fourth Form Room, of which one had heard so much that the actual sight of it made one half inclined to laugh and half to cry with surprise and disappointment. There was the twisting High Street, with its precipitous causeway; there was the faithful presentment of the fashionable "tuck-shop," with two boys standing in the road, and the leg of a third caught by the camera as he hurried past; and, wandering through all these scenes in the album as one had wandered through them in real life, I reached at last my boarding-house, once a place of mystery and wonderful expectations and untried experiences; now full of memories, some bright, some sad, but all gathering enchantment from their retrospective distance; and in every brick and beam and cupboard and corner as familiar as home itself.
The next picture, a view of the School Bathing-place, carried me a stage onward in memory to my first summer quarter. Two terms of school life had inured one to a new existence, and one began to know the pleasures, as well as the pains, of a Public School. It was a time of cloudless skies, and abundant "strawberry mashes," and dolce far niente in that sweetly-shaded pool, when the sky was at its bluest, and the air at its hottest, and the water at its most inviting temperature.
And then the Old Speech-Room, so ugly, so incommodious, where we stood penned together like sheep for the slaughter, under the gallery, to hear our fate on the first morning of our school life, and where, when he had made his way up the school, the budding scholar received his prize or declaimed his verses on Speech Day. That was the crowning day of the young orator's ambition, when there was an arch of evergreens reared over the school gate, and Lyonness was all alive with carriages, and relations, and grandees,
"And, as Lear, he poured forth the deep imprecation,
By his daughters of Kingdom and reason deprived;
Till, fired by loud plaudits and self-adulation,
He regarded himself as a Garrick revived."
Opposite the Old Speech-Room was the interior of the Chapel, with its roof still echoing the thunder of the Parting Hymn; and the pulpit with its unforgotten pleadings for truthfulness and purity; and the organ, still vocal with those glorious psalms. And, high over all, the Churchyard Hill, with its heaven-pointing spire, and the Poet's Tomb; and, below, the incomparable expanse of pasture and woodland stretching right away to the "proud keep with its double belt of kindred and coeval towers."
"Still does yon bank its living hues unfold,