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,
With bloomy wealth of amethyst and gold;
How oft at eve we watched, while there we lay,
The flaming sun lead down the dying day,
Soothed by the breeze that wandered to and fro
Through the glad foliage musically low.
Still stands that tree, and rears its stately form
In rugged strength, and mocks the winter storm;
There, while of slender shade and sapling growth,
We carved our schoolboy names, a mutual troth.
All, all, revives a bliss too bright to last,
And every leaflet whispers of the past."

And while the views of places were thus eloquent of the old days,
assuredly not less so were the portraits. There was the Head Master in
his silken robes, looking exactly as he did when, enthroned in the Sixth
Form Room,