of their temperament, they went
at the trucks, and Babel began. Amid a confused roar of contradictory
exhortations, with energetic gesture, and faces full of animation and
fire, they were hauling away, to any and every place, the ton-loads of
mattresses, and the fragments of unnumbered bedsteads. It was time for
the owners to interpose; and those of the school party who were present,
knowing that time was very precious, and that example is better than
precept, especially precept in a foreign language, put their own hands to
the work, the Headmaster being foremost, and earned a labouring man's
wage at unloading the trucks and carrying the goods to their billets.
Some of our new acquaintances watched the scene with a shocked surprise
that authorities should share in the manual labour, instead of looking on
and paying for it. But their feelings at last determined to admiration.
"Why, sirs," they exclaimed, "you get it done as if you were used to move
every three weeks." But, in fact, there was so much to be done, and so
few days to do it in, that the exigencies of the work spared neither age,
sex, nor degree of our party. None were exempt, and those who were not
employed in porterage and rough carpentry might be found shifting
furniture, or stitching curtains, or jointing together bedsteads.

Meanwhile, workmen in and round the hotel were as busy as
stage-carpenters preparing a transformation scene. First, by the
elimination of carpets and furniture, the interior was reduced to a
_tabula rasa_. Then, in the somewhat weather-beaten top story,
plastering and surface-washing went briskly on. Our hosts assured us no
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 use