naively but pointedly he noted that no offence had ever been given; "No
boy had laughed at the villagers, if they were old and queer-looking or
queerly dressed; there had been no disorder, no shabby act, nothing
_un_decent" (so he put it in his unpractised English) "during the whole
twelve months we had spent among them." We give his testimony without
note or comment, sure that the facts would not be better told in words
less simple. They were little things he witnessed to; was it a little
thing that the witness could be truly borne?

The boys were not present to hear the speeches, but they will like well
to remember the scene without doors at that unlooked-for reunion of
school and village. It was a scene made up of homely elements enough,
but somehow, in our own memory at least, few pictures will remain printed
in such fast colours. Clearly, as on that evening, we shall always see,
distinct in the quiet light of the afterglow, the ranks of serious faces,
touched and stilled by the surprise of a contagious sympathy, as English
boys and Welsh cottagers looked each other in the face, and felt, if for
the space of a few heartbeats only, an outflash of that ancient kinship
which binds man and man together more than race and circumstance divide.

It pleases the smaller kind of criticism to cheapen the meaning of such
incidents as this, and explain them by the easy reference to interested
and conventional motives. Wiser men will take occasion to rejoice that
human nature is after all so kind; and if this be error, we would rather
err with the wise. Take once again our thanks, kind people of Borth, if
our thanks are worth your taking. You showed us no little kindness in a
strange land, and the day is far off when we shall forget the friendly,
gentle people whose name is the memorial of a great ill escaped, of much
good enjoyed, in the days that are over, and the landmark of who knows
what greater good in the days that are to be.