Meanwhile the confusion on the common was indescribable. I can even now on calling it to mind only lift up hands of amazement. To get the three horses out was in itself no easy task for persons unaccustomed to such work, but to get the three tables out and try to unfold them and make them stand straight on the uneven turf was much worse. All things in a caravan have hinges and flaps, the idea being that they shall take up little room; but if they take up little room they take up a great deal of time, and that first night when there was not much of it these patent arrangements which made each chair and table a separate problem added considerably to the prevailing chaos. Having at length set them out on wet grass, table-cloths had to be extracted from the depths of the yellow boxes in each caravan and spread upon them, and immediately they blew away on to the furze bushes. Recaptured and respread they immediately did it again. Mrs. Menzies-Legh, when I ventured to say that I would not go and fetch them next time they did it, told me to weigh them down with the knives and forks, but nobody knew where they were, and their discovery having defied our united intelligences for an immense amount of precious time was at last the result of the merest chance, for who could have dreamed they were concealed among the bedding? As for Edelgard, I completely lost control over her. She seemed to slip through my fingers like water. She was everywhere, and yet nowhere. I do not know what she did, but I know that she left me quite unaided, and I found myself performing the most menial tasks, utterly unfit for an officer, such as fetching cups and saucers and arranging spoons in rows. Nor, if I had not witnessed it, would I ever have believed that the preparation of eggs and coffee was so difficult. What could be more frugal than such a supper? Yet it took the united efforts for nearly two hours of seven highly civilized and intelligent beings to produce it. Edelgard said that that was why it did, but I at once told her that to reason that the crude and the few are more capable than the clever and the many was childish.