CHAPTER X 



Our House on Fire Doctor Temple and the Fire Buckets The 

 Coming of Jester Buying Setters from Captain Russell- 

 England Stevenson's Ghost Story Undiscovered Mystery 

 Lee- Warner baffled Memories of Rugby Our House 

 Twenty My Temporary Exclusion Rugby Football Fifty 

 Years Ago Appreciation of Dr Temple How he remembered 

 all old Rugbeians My Disillusion 



I SHOULD indeed be groping for a dim phantom of 

 myself amid the darkness of the vanished years 

 were it not that the letters, which I never thought 

 to see again, bring back the touch of renewed life. Some 

 of the contemporary events, however, have lived in 

 memory without the need for any reminder, and one such 

 was the breaking out of a serious fire in our house one night 

 in the earlier part of 1867. The excitement of it was 

 indeed a joy to most of us. The fire was blazing under 

 some of the bedrooms and there were stories which were 

 little credited of the legs of beds going through the floor 

 and consequent narrow escapes of sleepers. 



Downstairs, amid firemen, there was infinite pleasure in 

 being organised to pass along water-buckets from hand 

 to hand, or to assist in carrying away valuables to safe 

 places. The garish light and our strange varieties of 

 undress made the scene one never to be forgotten, and 

 amid it all Doctor Temple arrived from the School House 

 to give us the moral support of his presence. There were 

 many buckets full of water standing ready to be passed 

 along, and the Doctor was always very short-sighted. 

 Striding towards us he stepped into one of these buckets 

 and then, staggering to save himself from falling, he stepped 

 with the other foot into another. It was a trying scene 

 to those who dared not laugh, and it says much for the 

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