f and
displaying an interior of intricate detail and much vigour of coloring.
It is the floor I think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed
to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there
are steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF
THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown
surround were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine.

I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I
owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have not
forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous west
of England builder; including my father he had three nephews, and for
each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made by an out-of-work
carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand,
but a really adequate quantity of bricks made out of oak and shaped
and smoothed, bricks about five inches by two and a half by one, and
half-bricks and quarter-bricks to correspond. There were hundreds of
them, many hundreds. I could build six towers as high as myself with
them, and there seemed quite enough for every engineering project I
could undertake. I could build whole towns with streets and houses and
churches and citadels; I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make
causeways over crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on
a keel of whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push
over the high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplined
population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and
all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors and
soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.

Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write
about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common theme for
essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out of
the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink and glory of the
performance and the final conflagration. I had such a theatre once, but
I never loved it nor hoped for much from it; my bricks and soldiers were
my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There
was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make,
with long passages and steps and windows through which one peeped into
their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting