The snow "packed well," and the boys worked like beavers.

With spades and brooms and hands and homemade wooden shovels, they built under Napoleon's directions a snow fort that set all Brienne wondering and admiring.

There were intrenchments and redoubts, bastions and ramparts, and all the parts and divisions and defences that make up a real fort.
It took some days to build this wonderful fort.

For the boys could only work in their hours of recess.

But at last, when all was ready, Napoleon divided the schoolboys into two unequal portions.