But at last a feeling begins to arise in the minds both of hosts and guests that the play is played out for the day, that the little festivity is over.  On the part of our hosts that feeling manifests itself in a tendency to press departing guests to stay a little longer.  An old acquaintance of mine, a shy man, once gave a large garden-party and had a band to play.  He did his best for a time and times and half-a-time; but at last he began to feel that the strain was becoming intolerable.  With desperate ingenuity he sought out the band-master, told him to leave out the rest of the programme, and play “God Save the King,”—­the result being a furious exodus of his guests.  Today no such device is needed.  We melt away, leaving our kind entertainers to the pleasant weariness that comes of sustained geniality, and to the sense that three hundred and sixty-four days have to elapse before the next similar festival.

And, for myself, I carry away with me a gracious memory of a day thrilled by a variety of conflicting and profound emotions; and if I feel that perhaps life would be both easier and simpler, if we could throw off a little more of our conventional panoply of thought, could face our problems with a little more candour and directness, yet I have had a glimpse of a community living an eager, full, vigorous life, guarded by sufficient discipline to keep the members of it wholesomely and honourably obedient, and yet conceding as much personal liberty of thought and action as the general interest of the body can admit.  I have seen a place full of high possibilities and hopes, bestowing a treasure of bright memories of work, of play, of friendship, upon the majority of its members, and upholding a Spartan ideal of personal subordination to the common weal, an ideal not enforced by law so much as sustained by honour, an institution which, if it does not encourage originality, is yet a sound reflection of national tendencies, and one in which the men who work it devote themselves unaffectedly and ungrudgingly to the interests of the place, without sentiment perhaps, but without ostentation or priggishness.  A place indeed to which one would wish perhaps to add a certain intellectual stimulus, a mental liberty, yet from which there is little that one would desire to take away.  For if one would like to see our schools strengthened, amplified and expanded, yet one would wish the process to continue on the existing lines, and not on a different method.  So, in our zeal for cultivating the further hope, let us who would fain see a purer standard of morals, a more vigorous intellectual life prevail in our schools, not overlook the marvellous progress that is daily and hourly being made, and keep the taint of fretful ingratitude out of our designs; and meanwhile let us, in the spirit of the old Psalm, wish Jerusalem prosperity “for our brethren and companions’ sakes.”

XIII