We hardly know how to describe with the epic dignity which it merits the act by which they testified their joy at our return. We who saw the sight were reminded of an incident in the Æneid—
Instar montis equum divina Palladis arte
Aedificant, sectaque intexunt abiete costas;
Votum pro reditu simulant.* * * * *
Pueri circum innuptaeque puellae
Sacra canuut, funemque manu contingere gaudent.
But the ill-starred folk of Troy could not have shown more enthusiasm in haling within their walls the fatal wooden horse, than did the men and boys of Uppingham, who harnessed themselves, some four-score of them, to that guileless structure, which, though indeed it has some other name, we will call at present our triumphal car. They harnessed themselves to it at the
east-end of the town, and drew it with the pomp of a swarming multitude all the length of the long street to its western mouth and half the way back again. On went that unwieldy car of triumph, bearing a freight of eager faces behind its windows, and carrying a crowd of sitters, precariously clustered wherever a perch could be found on its swaying roof, under the verdant span of the arches and the flow of the streamers:
Ilia subit mediæque minans inlabitur urbi.
On it went, with the hum of applauding voices increasing round it, till the popular fervour found articulate utterance in a burst of jubilant music. There swept past our ears, first, the moving strains of “Auld lang syne,” and then, as if in answer to the appeal to “Auld acquaintance,” came the jocund chorus “There is nae luck about the house”—most eloquent assurance that we were welcome home. And then in turn the music died down, and the crowd round the now halted procession cheered with a will for “the school,” “the Headmaster and the masters,” and the school taking up with zest the genial challenge, returned the blessing with such a shout as if they meant the echoes of that merry evening to make amends in full to street and houses for their fourteen months of silence.
It was “all over but the shouting:” but that was not over till some hours of dusk had gathered over school and town. For first the multitude besieged the well-known mighty gates, behind which lies the studious quiet of the Schoolhouse Quad. When they were admitted they came in like a flood, and filled the space within; but for all they were so many, there was an orderliness and quietude in the strange assemblage which made their
presence there seem not strange at all, and they listened like one man to the words in which the Headmaster, who came out to meet them, framed his thanks for this unequivocal welcome. This done, they flowed out again, and streamed across the valley and up the hill to carry the same message of goodwill to the distant houses, and so with more cheering and more speeches came to an end a day of happiest omen for the joint fortunes of Uppingham School and Town.
A few additional details are needed to complete our account. A friend, remarkable for his plain common-sense, reminds us that the epic vehicle we so indistinctly describe, was the Seaton ’bus, and that the music was due to “the splendid band connected with Mrs. Edmonds’ menagerie, which happened to be in the town.” We are not in a position to deny either statement, or another to the effect that “the conveyances which accompanied the ’bus formed a procession of considerable length,” having been halted by arrangement outside the town, and formed into file for the entry. When the same friend hazards some further criticism on a confusion of dates and incidents in our narrative, in which he finds the events of two days, a Friday and a Saturday, presented as in a single scene, we feel it time to silence him by an appeal, which he does not follow, to the “truer historic sense” and the “massive grouping” of imaginative history.