esults and hopes of more than twenty
long working years were poured out to waste.

When the crisis was perceived, a project which had been already the
unspoken thought in responsible quarters, but which would have sounded
like a counsel of despair had the situation been less acute, was suddenly
started in common talk and warmly entertained. Why should we not
anticipate calamity by flight? Before the school melted away, and left
us teaching empty benches, why should we not flit, master and scholar
together, and preserve the school abroad for a securer future afterwards
at home?

In a space of time to be measured rather by hours than days, this project
passed through the stages of conception, discussion, and resolve, to the
first step in its execution. On Tuesday, March 7th, a notice was issued
to parents and guardians that the school would break up that day week for
a premature Easter holiday, and at the end of the usual three weeks
reassemble in some other locality, of which nothing could as yet be
specified except that it was to be healthier than that we were leaving.

The proposed experiment--to transport a large public school from its
native seat and all its appliances and plant to a strange site of which
not even the name was yet known, except as one of several possible spots,
and to do this at a few days' notice--was no doubt a novel one. But the
resolve, if rapidly formed and daring, was none the less deliberate and
sane. Its authors must not be charged either with panic or a passion for
adventure. All the data of a judgment were in view, and delay could add
no new fact, except one which would make any decision nugatory because
too late. It was wisdom in those with whom lay the cast of the die, to
take their determination while a school remained for which they could
determine anything.

It was a sharp remedy, however. For on the morrow of this resolve the
owners of so many good houses, fields, and gardens, all the outward and
visible of Uppingham School, became, for a term without assignable limit,
landless and homeless men, and the Headmaster almost as much disburdened
of his titular realm as if he were a bishop _in partibus_ or the chief of
a nomad caravan. It was a sharp remedy; but those who submitted to it
breathed the freer at having broken prison, and felt something, not
indeed of the recklessness which inspires adventure, but of the elation
which sustains it:

Why now, blow wind, swell bil