There be delights, there be recreations and jolly pastimes that
   will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year
   as in a delightful dream.

   MILTON, “AREOPAGITICA.”

   O summer day, beside the joyous sea!
      O summer day, so wonderful and white,
      So full of gladness and so full of pain!
   For ever and for ever shalt thou be
      To some the gravestone of a dead delight,
      To some the landmark of a new domain.

   LONGFELLOW.

Housed, fed, and taught; what more does the school need done for it?  “Is that all?” some of the English public will exclaim.  “Then you have done nothing.  What about the boys’ sports?” We foresaw the question, and when we left home some people felt uneasy as to what would happen to a school separated from its fives-courts and playing-fields.  True, there was to be a beach, and the boys could amuse themselves by throwing stones into the sea:  but when there were no more stones to throw—­what then?  The prospect was a blank one.

Well, as we have seen, things came right enough as regarded the cricket.  Players had to content themselves with fewer games, for the ground could only be reached on half-holidays.  On the other hand, the season of 1876 gained a character of its own from the novelty of its matches against Welsh teams.  One of these was the eleven of Shrewsbury School.  With this ancient seat of learning our troubles brought us into genial intercourse, and a few months later we met them again on the football-field.  Both matches were played at Shrewsbury; in the former we gained a victory over our kind hosts, the latter was a drawn game.

The athletics were held on the straight reach of road beyond Old Borth; the steeple-chases in the fields which border it.  At the prize-giving, the “champion” was hoisted as usual, and carried round the hotel, instead of along the via sacra of the Uppingham triumph, with the proper tumultuary rites.  For the make-believe of paper-chases we had the realities of hare-hunting, of which we will speak again in its season.  Grounds for football were found when the autumn came; the best was a meadow just below Old Borth, of excellent turf, which dries quickly after rain; though the peaty soil, lately reclaimed from the marsh, would quake under the outset of the players.

The village boys, fired by a novel example, began to hold their own athletics.  One might see the corduroyed urchins scrambling down the street in a footrace, or jerking their awkward little limbs over a roadside ditch.  Our boys looked on as men look at a monkey, half amused, half indignant at the antics “which imitated humanity so abominably.”