he retrospect far more
significantly than they did at the time. I played them in bursts, and
then forgot them for long periods; through the spring and summer I was
mostly out of doors, and school and classes caught me early. And in
the retrospect I see them all not only magnified and transfigured, but
fore-shortened and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seem to
remember, came and went; one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships
that, being keeled, would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the
floor; a detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over,
given me by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from
an aunt, that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public
buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and
therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass
cannon in the garden.

I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my
memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that
went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they stooped
to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow growth of
whole days of civilised development. I still remember the hatred and
disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did I
disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, plucking garrisons
from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling them up in their wrong
boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping
the splendid curves of the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, casting
the jungle growth of Zululand into the fire.

"Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, "you
ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until you've
sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do it I will."

And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and
swiping strokes of house-flannel.

That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear lady,
was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore spring-sided
boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with dull
bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that were very
destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial Road. She
was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me for a meal,
fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity! fetching me for a wash
and brush up, and she never s