Our prosperity was suddenly staggered. Just five weeks after the return a case of scarlet fever occurred, followed in the course of the week by half-a-dozen more. An outbreak of this kind is too common an incident in a large school to merit much surprise or great alarm. But then our circumstances were exceptional. If the infection spread, it might be difficult to find hospital room; to communicate it to the villagers, as might easily befall, would be an unhappy return for their own ready hospitality; and then how miserable to have fled from sickness at Uppingham, and find it had followed us to Borth, as if, like the haunted family of the poem, “we had packed the thing among the beds.” Already there came news which raised unspoken doubts of our returning home after Christmas. How, then, if we could not stay here? The question was hard to answer.
It is, however, a well-recognised fact that epidemics of this kind are very much under the
control of scientific precautions, and as we had good advice on the spot, no time was lost in stamping out the plague. War is not made with rose-water (it certainly was not rose-water which reeked along our passages), and fever germs can be exterminated, it seems, by nothing less exasperatingly unsavoury than carbolic acid, an agency which was laid on without any ruth. Grumblers were offered the alternative of being smoked with sulphur. Some complained of sore throats, contracted, they said, from the fumes of the disinfectant, and declared that the remedy, like vaccination, was only a mitigated form of the disorder. The landlords of our studies looked on with irresolute wonder, when some of us sprinkled their floors with a potent decoction poured from watering-pots. Most of them regarded it as a kind of magical rite into which it would not be seemly to inquire. In one house a practical seaman, late home from a cruise, took a less reverent view of the lustration, and uttered hints of what he would do to the perpetrators’ heads if their acid touched his carpets again. Probably the best disinfectant applied was the clear strong wind, which ten days after the first case succeeded the previous relaxing weather. All windows and
doors were ordered wide open for the free passage of the blast; and the boys were directed to bring down their rugs, great-coats, and dressing-gowns, and anything of the kind which might be supposed to harbour mischief, and spread them for purification on the pebbles of the beach. It will be believed the scene was a quaint one, however it might remind the scholar of the idyllic laundry scene by the Phæacian shore, where Nausicaa and her maidens:
επει πλυναν τε καθηραν τε ρυπα παντα
‘Εξειης πετασαν παρα θιν’ αλος, ηχι μαλιστα
Λαιyyας ποτι χερσον αποπλυνεσκε θαλασσα.
Whether it was these purgations, or the fumes of the carbolic which exorcised the infection, or whether the pest was starved out by the immediate and careful isolation of the cases that occurred, we must leave doctors to determine. It is certain that the epidemic came to an end in less than ten days after the first case. That we were able to apply the most necessary of measures, that of isolating at once all cases declared or suspected, we owe to the readiness of the villagers to put house-room at our service, a readiness on which we certainly had no right to calculate. The rent we might pay
them was no measure of the service rendered. If a panic had closed their doors, our situation would have been worse than critical.
The cause of the outbreak could not be confidently assigned, but since the most probable theory traced it to a recent railway excursion made by some school parties, these expeditions were discontinued for a time. This was no great privation, for the year was closing in.
About this time, October 16th, the appointment of new “Præpostors” was made, to fill up vacancies in the body. In speaking as usual on the occasion, the Headmaster called attention to the experiment in self-government which our special circumstances were affording. There would be little reason for our recording the occasion, were it not that since that date the monitorial system in public schools has been canvassed in the Press, on occasion of an untoward incident of recent notoriety, and has been described by some as the parent of the “grossest tyranny,” ruinous to the future of any school from which the institution is inseparable. We had thought this view of the system obsolete, or correct only of schools subject to obsolete conditions. If we were mistaken, it may be
worth while to record an experience which tends to a less pessimistic conclusion.