hands could be found for this work, but the Headmaster made a descent
upon Aberystwith and returned with the required number. A contractor was
fitting the large coffee-rooms, the billiard-room and others, and the
ground-floor corridor from end to end, with long narrow tables--plain
deal boards on wooden trestles--for the accommodation of three hundred
diners. Outside, the stables were converted into the school carpentery,
and the coach-house into a gymnasium. Above all, a wooden school-room,
eighty-three feet by twenty, had been designed, and its site marked out
on the north side of the enclosure behind the hotel.

Then there was the care of providing supplementary house-room for many
purposes: rooms for music practice, and for the boys' studies (of which
we shall have more to say), and for hospital uses. Ordinary "sick-room"
accommodation was soon obtained by paying for it, but a fever hospital
was also a requirement which, with our experiences, we were not likely to
forget, and this was less easy to secure. We had to scour the
neighbourhood, knocking at the door of many a farmhouse and country
homestead, before we were provided.

The house-room being secured, came the labour of furnishing; the
distribution of tables, benches, bookshelves, &c, for the class-rooms,
and of furniture (in many cases a minimum) for the needs of masters and
their families; the ticketing of the bed-room doors, the beds, the chests
of drawers, and each drawer in them, with the name of the occupant--with
many like minutiae, which it took longer to provide than it does to
detail them. The task was not rendered easier by being shared in part
with our hosts, who had hardly taken the measure of our requirements. It
became necessary at the last moment to telegraph to the Potteries for a
large consignment of bed-room ware, which, in spite of protestations, had
been laid in only in half quantities. The world of school has marched