Transcribed from the 1878 Macmillan and Co. edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
A Narrative of the Year at Borth.
BY
J. H. S.
απολις · υψιπολις.
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1878.
[All Rights reserved.]
p. ivcharlesdickens and evans,
crystal palace press.
scholæ uppinghamiensis conditori alteri,
ob cives servatos:
et
magistris adjutoribus,
qui,
salute communi in ultimum adducta discrimen,
de re publica
non desperaverunt.
In the spring of 1876 and of 1877, letters under the heading “Uppinghamby the Sea” were published in The Times newspaper, andwere read with interest by friends of the school. We have thoughtthe following narrative would be best introduced to those readers undera name already pleasantly familiar to them, and have borrowed, withthe writer’s permission, the title of his sketches for our ownmore detailed account of the same events.
The readers whom we have in view will demand no apology for the attemptto supply a circumstantial record of so memorable an p. viiiepisodein the school’s history. It deserves indeed an abler historian;but one qualification at any rate may be claimed by the present writer:an eye-witness from first to last, but a minor actor only in the sceneshe chronicles, he enjoyed good opportunities of watching the play, andrisks no personal modesty in relating what he saw.
The best purpose of the narrative will have been served if any Uppinghamboy, as he reads these pages, finds in them a new reason for loyaltyto the society whose name he bears.
June 27th,1878,
Founder’s Day.
“O what have we ta’en?” saidthe fisher-prince,
“What have we ta’en this morning’stide?
Get thee down to the wave, my carl,
And row me the net to the meadow’s-side.”In he waded, the fisher-carl,
And “Here,” quoth he,“is a wondrous thing!
A cradle, prince, and a fair man-child,
Goodly to see as the son of a king!”The fisher-prince he caught the word,
And “Hail,” he cried,“to the king to be!
Stranger he comes from the storm and the night;
But his fame shall wax, and his name be bright,
While the hills look down on the Cymry sea.”Finding of Taliesin.
Elphin, son of Gwyddno, the prince who ruled the coasts between theDovey and the Ystwith, came down on a May-day morning to his father’sfishing-weir. All that was taken that morning p. 2wasto be Elphin’s, had Gwyddno said. Not a fish was taken thatday; and Elphin, who was ever a luckless youth, would have gone homeempty-handed, but that one of his men found, entangled in the polesof the weir, a coracle, and a fair child in it. T