Tea was over at last, and the crumby remains having been cleared away, the tables were pushed to one side of the great schoolroom to form the platform, while the benches were arranged in rows to accommodate the audience, which at present was indulging in an amount of noise only to be equalled by the Tower of Babel. Peggy, hard at work behind the scenes, put her eye to a hole in the curtain, and surveyed the prospect below, where children big and little were engaged in jumping over the forms, chasing each other round the stove, and generally acting more like monkeys at the Zoo than civilized human beings, while the Rector strove in vain to collect them at the empty end of the room to play games, and the curate, a shy young man fresh from Oxford, looked as if he would have preferred to wrestle with a consignment of heathens from the Cannibal Islands.