"You can do your work where you please. The schoolroom, the workshop, the grove, are open to you, as well as your rooms," replied the principal. "I consider that each pupil is put on honor not to look at the work of another. Before the prizes are awarded I shall ask each one if the plan is wholly his own idea, and I shall be willing to take his word for it."
"Then everything must be original, must it?" asked Bolly Millweed. "If we have seen an arrangement of doors or windows we like in a hotel or church, we must not use it."
"Not at all," answered Captain Gildrock, a little impatiently. "If you have ideas, they belong to you though you did not originate them. I simply insist that you shall not use one another's ideas. I don't expect you to originate many if any new ideas in architecture and engineering; only to combine old ones for the particular structure we have in view. I only ask you to do what any old farmer would do if he wanted to put up a set of farm buildings; and he would not go near an architect or civil engineer, though it might pay him to do so."
"I understand it now," said Dave.
"I hope you all understand it; but if there are any questions to be asked it must be done now, for not one will be considered after I dismiss you this time. You may use any of the boats on Beech Hill Lake during the next three days without further permission."
The boys were ashamed to ask any more questions, and they left the schoolroom. They were not to talk together about the plans, and they separated outside the door, each to make his examination of the shores of the little lake by himself. In a few minutes they were scattered all along the border of the lake and creek, each one carefully avoiding all the others; for, under the skilful training of Captain Gildrock, each one had come to regard his honor as the apple of his eye.
Of course there were some of the boys who had no more idea of the making of a plan or the fitness of a locality for the boat-house than they had of the erection of a Chinese pagoda; and the principal hardly expected that more than half a dozen plans of the building and as many of the location would be submitted. But he knew that the study given by the pupils to the subject would be worth more than the prize to them.
It was rather amusing to see some of them making so serious a matter of the plans, but probably every one of them thought he could select the best location for the wharf and boat-house, even if he could not make a mark towards the plan of the structure. Many of them seated themselves under the trees in view of the lake, with paper and pencil in hand, as though they had begun to make the rough sketches of the plan.
By the middle of the forenoon it was clear that some of the students had got their ideas in working order, for they went to the schoolroom, and began to make sketches on brown paper. But others were not satisfied with the limited survey they had made of the lake, and wished to visit the other side. Though the creek was narrow, there was no bridge on the Beech Hill grounds, and it was too wide to be leaped over. Mat Randolph proposed that they should go over in the barges. All hands were called, and they assented to the plan.
When they were seated in the boats, with only nine oarsmen in each, it was decided to make a trip around the lake, in order to examine the shore from the water side. At the head of the lake, in the rear of the shop and schoolroom, was a rocky hill rising to the height of about a hundred feet in the loftiest place. The rocks rose perpendicularly from the lake, and the water was four feet deep alongside of them.