"Who ought to take the command, in the event of anything happening to your lordship?" asked Wellington's officers on an occasion in the Peninsular War. "Beresford," the great strategist answered, after reflection. And then, in answer to their surprised looks: "If it were a question of handling troops, some of you fellows might do as well, perhaps better than he; but what we now want is someone to _feed_ our men." {46} This story, and the countenance of the epic and royal personages of our mottoes, is our excuse for passing on to treat of the ignoble topic of knives and forks, and to describe how three times a day our colony was fed. It is a topic which could not be left outside a narrative which seeks to "show how fields were won." If our readers will follow the master of the week as he makes his round of the tea-tables at a quarter to seven on a winter evening, he will witness a cheerful scene not wanting in picturesqueness. The vista of the corridor is filled with three very long and very narrow tables, and the boys of as many houses seated at them. The subdued light, which streams from numerous but feeble oil-lamps through the atmosphere of fragrant vapour steamed up by the tea-urns, falls with Rembrandtesque contrast of light and shadow on the long ranks of faces. There is that hum of quiet animation which seems always to exhale along with the aroma of the Chinese leaf. From the urn, where the house matron mounts guard up to the Sixth Form end of the table, where the head of the house is jotting down the list of absentees from the roll-call, the cloth is thickly studded with the viands in tins and jars, rich and various in colour, with which the schoolboy adds succulence to his meal. We open a door out of the dim corridor, and enter a room with three more houses seated round its walls. The sense of animation rises with the warmth and brightness of the fire which roars in the grate. We collect the lists, and move on to another and another room, till we have seen the last of the eleven houses in a severely simple servants'-hall on the basement floor. Thence we return to the wind and rain outside. If we came here at dinner-time, we should see the housemaster at the head of his table, and his wife or members of his family at the other end. The scene would be quite wanting in the picturesque, but no sense of comfort would make amends for it. For it is dark, especially in the centre of the corridor, and the carver of those vast joints never knows when he will strike his elbow against the walls or passers-by; while the incidence of draughts is clearly enough defined by here and there a coat- collar turned up in self-defence; for neither the glass front door, nor the wooden porch, nor our massive porter can effectually keep out the weather. Dinner here is a stern bit of the day's work, to be discharged with a serious fortitude.