Thenceforward the weeks rolled smoothly on, unmarked by moving incident, till they gladdened us with the growing light of spring, and brought us within near sight of our home.  Must the truth be told?  We are all of us loyal sons of Uppingham, but not all of us were glad to find our return to the mother-country was at last arriving.  So far away from the offence, we need not fear attainder if we confess, some few of us, that our hearts were not whole in their welcome of the long-deferred event.  It belonged to the irony that waits on all lives which are not too dull a material for fortune’s jests, that we should cease to desire our home just when long patience and often-thwarted efforts, and

   The slow, sad hours which bring us all things ill,
   And all good things from evil,

had brought its coveted security at last within our reach.  For so it was with some of us.  Perhaps the air of sea and mountain had got into the blood, and infected it with a certain disrelish for the restraints, the even decorum, and the tamer surroundings of our life in the Midlands.  Well, we are not the only emigrants who have preferred their backwoods to the streets of the mother city, nor the first campaigners who have come back to home-quarters a trifle spoiled by adventure.  And, moreover, while everything about us was a reminder of what we must forego, there was nothing to tell us of what a greeting our townsmen were preparing for us, or of the solid mutual good which filled the vista beyond that auspicious welcome.

However, alike for those who were impatient and those who were half reluctant to attain it, the equal-handed hours brought the end of our exile.  On one of our last evenings, April 6th, a reading was given in the school-room, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with Mendelssohn’s music; no unfit close, we said, to our annns mirabilis.  For, indeed, its incidents had been “such stuff as dreams are made of,” as whimsical if not quite as harmless, as if their plot had been directed by the blithe goblin of Shakespeare’s fantasy.  The chorus of readers and of singers were so far encouraged by their success, as to offer a second recital as a farewell entertainment to the good people of Borth.  They enjoyed it hugely.  Doubtless some of the simpler members of that audience would follow the drift of the Sassenach poet only at a certain distance; but Bottom’s “transformed scalp,” a pasteboard ass’s-head, come all the way from Nathan’s, was eloquent without help of an interpreter.  “Oh! that donkey, he was beautiful,” was the dramatic criticism of an esteemed friend, a fisher’s wife.  The criticism was at least sincere; from the moment of the monster’s entry she had been in one rapture of laughter, till her “face was like a wet cloak ill laid up.”  Well, the kind soul had reason good enough for her merriment.  But had the reason been less, our neighbours would not have lost the occasion of dropping the shyness of intercourse in a frank outburst of good fellowship.