Everyone saw the sense of this， and for the next half.hour they were busy. The orchard through which they had first come into the ruins turned out not to be a good place for firewood. They tried the other side of the castle， passing out of the hall by a little side door into a maze of stony humps and hollows which must once have been passages and smaller rooms but was now all nettles and wild roses. Beyond this they found a wide gap in the castle wall and stepped through it into a wood of darker and bigger trees where they found dead branches and rotten wood and sticks and dry leaves and fir.cones in plenty. They went to and fro with bundles until they had a good pile on the dais. At the fifth journey they found the well， just outside the hall， hidden in weeds， but clean and fresh and deep when they had cleared these away. The remains of a stone pavement ran halfway round it. Then the girls went out to pick some more apples and the boys built the fire， on the dais and fairly close to the corner between two walls， which they thought would be the snuggest and warmest place. They had great difficulty in lighting it and used a lot of matches， but they succeeded in the end. Finally， all four sat down with their backs to the wall and their faces to the fire. They tried roasting some of the apples on the ends of sticks. But roast apples are not much good without sugar， and they are too hot to eat with your fingers till they are too cold to be worth eating. So they had to content themselves with raw apples， which， as Edmund said， made one realize that school suppers weren’t so bad after all. “I shouldn‘t minda good thick slice of bread and margarine this minute，” he added. But the spirit of adventure was rising in them all， and no one really wanted to be back at school.
