Another silly question

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187224

Speaking of silly questions, I'm rereading CoS (which is funnier than I remembered, at least in places) and I was wondering--does Hermione just leave her cauldron in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom when she and the boys aren't adding ingredients to the Polyjuice Potion? She can't very well take it back to her dorm room, and the lacewing flies have to stew for twenty-one days, so it has to stay in the bathroom, right? Which leaves Hermione without a cauldron for at least three weeks. 

So what does she do in Snape's class? There's a passage describing twenty simmering cauldrons right before Harry tosses the firecracker into Goyle's cauldron to distract Snape while Hermione steals the bicorn horn and boomslang skin from Snape's office, making it sound as if Hermione (one of the twenty) has her own cauldron. There's no indication that she's sharing a cauldron, and it would have been extremely suspicious if she arrived at Potions class without one. (Or maybe they keep the cauldrons in a particular dungeon classroom, with each Potions class held in a separate room?)

At any rate, my question is, if Hermione's cauldron is busily bubbling away in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, where did she get another cauldron to use for Potions? (She doesn't know about the Room of Requirement yet, and I don't suppose that even Hermione can just conjure a cauldron out of thin air, especially in second year.)

That leads me to another problem with the Polyjuice story. Supposedly, the fluxweed has to be picked at midnight, which means that it can't just be taken like the leeches, knotgrass, and lacewing flies from the potion ingredients that Snape keeps in his classroom. Did HRH sneak down to a greenhouse or garden under the Invisibility Cloak to pick the fluxweed, of did JKR just forget that detail?

Another interesting thing about that sequence of events--Goyle's Swelling Solution does exactly what it's supposed to do--causes hands and noses of the people its splashed on to swell so that Snape has to give half the class the antidote, Deflating Draft. *Goyle's* potion was perfectly prepared? Did Draco help him with it or is Goyle less stupid than we think he is? Maybe he actually deserved his passing marks in Potions class.

BTW, Moaning Myrtle's bathroom is described in my edition as being on the first floor, but it has to be on the second floor, the same place that the Petrified Mrs. Norris was found. (Or maybe "first" means second--one floor up from the ground floor, which Americans call the first floor--in which case Mrs. Norris was found on the "first" floor--or "first storey," as the British would say.)

Carol, who also noted some problems with consistency (specifically, timing) in her reread of SS/PS but will leave those comments for a later post