GROWTH UNDER STORMY SKIES. 221 



excitement prevailed in the village. The news spread into 

 other villages and circulated in the town of Diss. It resulted 

 in newspaper men visiting Burston, and one local newspaper 

 referred to it in an exaggerated headline as " The Burston 

 Revolution." 



It was a fitting day, this ist of April, for the county 

 constabulary to parade in force to overawe the chil- 

 dren ; but it was not the chattering, smiling children 

 who looked foolish. They, arrayed in their brightest 

 pinafores and carrying little flags, assembled on the village 

 green and, marshalled by their mothers, marched in pro- 

 cession past the open gates of the Council school, which they 

 were determined never to enter again until their dismissed 

 and well-loved teachers had been reinstated. Rather, it 

 was the large-limbed, blue-coated constabulary parading 

 in front of the fearless children, as well as the school 

 managers, the Rector, another clergyman and the Rector's 

 wife, who looked exceedingly foolish. 



It was a curious scene, full of colour and movement, 

 which must have appeared to the detached spectator as a 

 pastoral play with a strong element of comedy, and to a 

 student of literature as a scene of rustic life in the early 

 nineteenth century, rather than a hundred years later when 

 we were on the eve of a world struggle for the defence of 

 freedom. 



The pronouncements of County Councillors, of lawyers, of 

 managers, had been set at naught by these simple villagers 

 and their children, who felt that their teachers, Mr. and Mrs. 

 Higdon, had been unjustly dismissed and victimised for 

 their championship of the labourer's cause. 



On the moonlit village green, even as late as midnight 

 with a keen east wind blowing, mothers and fathers, 

 girls and boys, had assembled to protest against the 

 dismissal and to decide upon future action. Parents 

 and children had been helping by means of donkey carts 

 and wheelbarrows to move their evicted teachers' goods to 

 the only possible places in overcrowded labourers' cottages, 

 that is, to empty coal holes and larders, whilst the teachers 

 took up their quarters at lodgings proffered at the mill. 



