207 



Excursions. 



Sherborne Ahhey and Park, May J^th. The Club was most fortu- 

 nate in having so fine a day for the first excursion of the season 

 to Sherborne. Tuesday was simply a perfect May day, and as 

 the members, comfortably "located" in a saloon carriage, ascended 

 the slope of the Mendips and found themselves on the watershed 

 at Maesbury, looking over the Somerset moors, with a bright 

 sun and a clear sky everywhere around them, they thought that 

 the *' merry month of May " was after all not merely a tradition 

 of the past, but a bright possession of the present. Glastonbury 

 Tor, to those unfamiliar with the curious freaks of denudation, 

 stood out like a huge conical tumulus on the horizon, appearing 

 and disappearing as the train swept down the winding descent to 

 Shepton Mallet, and the Polden hills were seen, a faint blue 

 bank in the distance. The trees were hardly yet in full leafage, 

 and the grass, owing to the cold nights and late season, was very 

 scanty of growth ; but, notwithstanding this, the rich, rolling 

 Somerset meadows through which the train passed to Temple- 

 combe looked as only Somerset meadows can look — verdantly 

 luxuriant. At Sherborne the members were met at the station 

 by the vicar, the Eev. W. H. Lyon and his son, and were at once 

 conducted by the south porch of the Abbey to the King's School. 

 Here one of the masters, the Eev. A. Wood, showed them over 

 the school whilst the vicar attended the mid-day service in the 

 Abbey. From the schoolroom, erected within the last eight 

 years, containing an organ at one end for concerts (music being 

 one of the fine arts much cultivated at this school), all the 

 various portions of the buildings were visited in detail. The 

 boys' studies — once the cells of the Benedictine monks, whose 

 monastery formerly stood on the north side of the Abbey, and 

 has now been appropriated for the use of the school ; the crypt — 

 with its Norman piers; the old schoolroom — built 1670, with the 

 statue of King Edward VI, at its east end, transferred from a 



