There was great roaring and noise in the fracas, which was of short duration, but long enough to bring out the men from the Hive to witness the affair. The General, who had been sleeping a little late--probably he had been baking bread the night before--made his appearance from his little room on the ground floor, with boot on one foot and shoe on the other, just as it was all over, with the impatient inquiry, "W-w-what is it all about?" On an explanation of the affair being made, the next question he asked, in all earnestness, soberness and simplicity, was "W-h-o-i-c-h came out ahead?" The personal appearance and manner of the General, and the absurd question, uttered in a vehement and stammering way, touched a ludicrous spot in the minds of the spectators so permanently that should you ask one of them to-day, "Which came out ahead?" he will smile or give you a shout of laughter in return. It took but little to amuse, sometimes, for on one of the beautiful summer days at nooning time, a group of men were resting in the shade of the arbor that was on an island artificially made in the brook below the terraces in front of the Hive, breathing the pure, balmy air of outdoors instead of the indoor air of the workshop, reclining on the thick greensward, when some two or three essayed the not very difficult feat of jumping the merrily running brook, from embankment to embankment, and dared Tirrell, one of the number, to follow. He was the oldest and a little less supple than the others; and in trying the jump deliberately landed about three inches short of the opposite bank, knee deep in the water. It was, as the young people say, "too funny for anything," but equally funny to the lookers-on to see the amused Chiswell, one of his mates, roll over and over on the greensward in repeated convulsions of side-splitting laughter, whilst the others, standing up, had hard work to keep their perpendicular and writhed in awful shapes as they joined in chorus with him, as Tirrell was slowly wading out of the water up the embankment. Trouble in financial affairs still existed. Cash in large amount was not received, and it was perilous times with the Direction. When the fall of the year came, it was announced that we must retrench our meagre diet, to enable us to go on until our labor could pay us better--until we could improve our employments and enlarge the institution so that there could be more producers--and it was submitted to without much complaint.