affectionate reverence with which one aged custodian spoke of the
"pianass" she was proud to house; she cherished them as if they had been
tame elephants. Several concerts were given during our stay--but in the
Assembly Rooms of Aberystwith; our wooden school-room was found, on the
first experiment, unfit for the purpose, from the want of resonance. The
makeshift gymnasium and carpentery, in the stables and coach-house, have
been mentioned before. If among "real studies" we may include the
cricket, this was, as we saw, well cared for; while the instructor in
swimming had nothing to complain of, with four miles of good beach, and
the Irish Channel before him.

If the accommodation during school hours was adequate, it was less easy
to find elbow-room for the boys at other times. It was well enough from
May to August under the ample roof of blue summer weather; but in the
rainy season (and at Borth, as elsewhere, that winter was a wet one) we
should have been sorely cramped but for relief afforded by the "studies"
noticed in a previous chapter. It is time we should describe them.
Studies they were not, in the sense in which the word is understood at
Uppingham, where a school law declares that "a boy's study is his
castle," and confers upon him what Aristotle calls the "unspeakable"
delight of the "sense of private property." At Borth this could not be.
In very rare cases was a room the one and indivisible belonging of a
single owner; often as many as six shared the table and fireplace. Some
of these tenements had at least the less solid merit of looking
picturesque. Peeping into a Welsh interior, with its stone
kitchen-floor, polished wainscoting, and oak furniture, its walls hung
with German prints of imaginative battle-pieces and Nonconforming
worthies, and its kitchen-dresser with ranks of ancestral crockery, vivid
in light and colour, which catches the eyes first of all things through
the open door, "This," one was tempted to cry, "were the study for me!