proof that, though my laziness
may have made me exacting, my exactions were not brutal.

On the 15th of June, 1871, Harrow School celebrated the three-hundredth
anniversary of its foundation. Harrovians came from every corner of the
globe to take part in this Tercentenary Festival. The arrangements were
elaborated with the most anxious care. The Duke of Abercorn,
affectionately and appropriately nicknamed "Old Splendid," presided
over a banquet in the School-Yard; and the programme of the day's
proceedings had announced, rather to the terror of intending visitors,
that after luncheon there would be "speeches, interspersed with songs,
from three hundred and fifty of the boys." The abolition of the second
comma dispelled the dreadful vision of three-hundred-and-fifty
school-boy-speeches, and all went merry as a marriage-bell--all, except
the weather. It seemed as if the accumulated rain of three centuries
were discharged on the devoted Hill. It was raining when we went to the
early celebration in the Chapel; it was raining harder when we came out.
At the culminating moment of the day's proceedings, when Dr. Vaughan was
proposing "Prosperity to Harrow," the downpour and the thunder drowned
the speaker's voice; and, when evening fell on the sodden
cricket-ground, the rain extinguished the fireworks.

On that same cricket-ground nine days later, in the golden afternoon of
Midsummer Day, George Clement Cottrell, a boy beautiful alike in face
and in character, was killed in an instant by a blow from a ball, which
struck him behind the ear when he was umpiring in the Sixth Form game.
On the 29th of June his five hundred school-fellows followed him to his
resting-place in the Churchyard on the Hill, and I believe we
unanimously felt that he whom we had lost was the one, of all our
number, of whom we could say, with the surest confidence, that he was
fit to pass, without a moment's warning, into the invisible World.
_Beati mundo corde_.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Writing to John Murray in 1832, Byron said--"There is a spot in the
Churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the Hill looking towards
Windsor, and a tomb under a large tree (bearing the name of Peachie, or
Peachey), where I used to sit for hours and hours as a boy: this was my
favourite spot."

[5] The Rev. E. M. Young.

[6] Herga is the Anglo-Saxon name of Harrow.

[7] Charlotte Seymour, Countess Spencer, died 1903.

[8] The name is borrowed from "Sybil." The be