s of your youth, and, in the last and
most awful day of all, may He remember you."

Five minutes afterwards we are in the open air. Boys stare and gasp;
masters hurry past, excited and loquacious. Notes are compared, and
watches consulted. Liddon has preached for an hour, and the school must
go without its dinner.

Enough has now been said about the Chapel and its memories. I must now
turn to lighter themes. I remember once hearing Mrs. Procter, who was
born in 1799 and died in 1888, say casually at a London dinner-party,
when someone mentioned Harrow Speech-Day--"Ah! that used to be a
pleasant day. The last time I was there I drove down with Lord Byron and
Doctor Parr, who had been breakfasting with my step-father, Basil
Montagu." This reminiscence seemed to carry one back some way, but I
entirely agreed with Mrs. Procter. Speech-Day at Harrow has been for
more than forty years one of my favourite holidays. In my time the
present Speech-Room did not exist. The old Speech-Room, added to John
Lyon's original building in 1819, was a well-proportioned hall, with
panelled walls and large windows. Tiers of seats rose on three sides of
the room; on the fourth was the platform, and just opposite the
platform sat the Head-master, flanked right and left by distinguished
visitors. There was a triumphal arch of evergreens over the gate, and
the presence of the Beadle of the Parish Church, sumptuous in purple and
gold, pointed to the historic but obsolescent connexion between the
Parish and the School. The material of the "Speeches," so-called, was
much the same as that provided at other schools--Shakespeare, Sheridan,
Chatham, Aristophanes, Plautus, Moliere, Schiller. An age-long desire to
play the Trial in _Pickwick_ was only attained, under the liberal rule
of Dr. Wood, in 1909. At the Speeches, one caught one's first glimpse of
celebrities whom one was destined to see at closer quarters in the years
to come; and I never can forget the radiant beauty of "Spencer's Faery
Queen,"[7] as I saw her at the Speeches of 1869.

While I am speaking of Celebrities, I must make a short digression from
Speech-Day to Holidays. Dr. Vaughan, some time Head-master of Harrow and
afterwards Dean of Llandaff, was in 1868 Vicar of Doncaster. My only
brother was one of his curates; the Vaughans asked my mother to stay
with them at the Vicarage, in order that she might see her son, then
newly ordained, at his work; and, the visit falling in the Harr