The boys thought quite otherwise. The kitchen was generally the last room to be chosen. Perhaps the idyllic attractions did not balance the drawback of living in the thoroughfare of the house. Nor could one fail to sympathise with those who preferred the garret, a poor thing but their own, in which two studious souls could hob-nob, or even the austere whitewash, narrow skylight, and niggard dimensions of some monastic cell, which held just the one student, his table, and his books. The editor of the School Magazine, writing a month after our arrival, finds it "a queer new feeling to do the old work in a strange place, to miss the accustomed pictures on the walls, the accustomed column of books rising on either hand--even the familiar table-cloth and carpet, and to sit instead inside the framework of a six-foot bed, with roof and walls forming the queerest possible combinations of lines and angles, and hung with three different patterns of paper." To woo the muses in a garret is the common fate of genius; but most of the "students" (for so their landladies, misled by a name, called the occupants of a study) were better off than this literary gentleman. When fires came to be lighted in the winter, there was a cheerful domesticity in the sight of the red coals, which is unknown to the solitude of Uppingham studies, with their hot-water pipe that warms but not exhilarates. In particular, one cheery well-furnished parlour, where a blazing hearth threw its light over the well-worn bindings of a select library brought with us from the Sixth-Form-room, and on the well- contented faces of its two custodians, burns as a bright spot in our memory of those winter days. Thus we managed things even better than if we had listened to another ingenious writer, with whose proposal we will close this topic. It was this: "Let two hundred bathing-machines be brought together from Llandudno and other watering-places within reach, and ranged along the beach. Let one machine be assigned to each boy, and let them be filled up with book-shelves, table, chairs, &c. Thus the whole difficulty will be solved in a moment. And the plan has this further advantage, that when the time comes for returning to Uppingham, the bathing-machines would be simply formed in line, and driven across the country to Rutlandshire, and all further trouble in the way of furniture-vans and families-removing be cut away at one stroke." CHAPTER VII.--THE COMMISSARIAT. _To feed were best at home_. MACBETH. [Greek verse] ILIAD IX. PRINCE HENRY. _Doth it not show vilely in me to desire small beer_? POINS. _Why_, _a prince should not be so loosely studied as to remember so weak a composition_. PRINCE HENRY. _Belike then my appetite was not princely got_; _for_, _by my troth_, _I do now remember the poor creature_, _small beer_. _But_, _indeed_, _these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness_. 2 HENRY IV.