.. And there was commerce; the shops
and markets and storerooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin
beans and such-like provender from the garden; such stuff one stored
in match boxes and pill boxes or packed in sacks of old glove fingers
tied up with thread and sent off by wagons along the great military
road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the
worn places that were dismal swamps....

"I find this empire of the floor much more vivid in my memory now than
many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that went gingerly
across its territories."

H. G. WELLS, "The New Machiavelli," Chapter 2.

[Illustration: The unsocial novice]

Nowhere else, perhaps, not even in his "Floor Games" and "Little Wars"
has Mr. Wells, or any other author succeeded in drawing so convincing
a picture of the possibilities of constructive play as is to be found
in those pages, all too brief, in "The New Machiavelli" where the play
laboratory at Bromstead is described. One can imagine the eager boy
who played there looking back across the years strong in the
conviction that it could not have been improved, and yet the picture
of a child at solitary play is not, after all, the ideal picture. Our
laboratory, while it must accommodate the unsocial novice and make
provision for individual enterprise at all ages and stages, must be
above all the place where the give and take of group play will develop
along with block villages and other community life in miniature.

FLOOR BLOCKS

In his reminiscences of his boyhood play Mr. Wells lays emphasis on
his great good fortune in possessing a special set of "bricks" made to
order and therefore sufficient in number for the ambitious floor games
he describes. Comparatively few adults can look back to the possession
of similar play material, and so a majority cannot realize how it
outweighs in value every other type of toy that can be provided.

Where the budget for equipment is limited, floor blocks can be cut by
the local carpenter or, in a school, by the manual training
department. The blocks in use at The Play School (see cut, p. 20) are
of white wood, the unit block being 1-3/8" X 2-3/4" X 5-1/2". They
range in size from half units and diagonals to blocks four times the
unit in length (22").

[Illustration: The Hill Floor Blocks at the Gregory Avenue School]

At present there is but one set of blocks on the market that
corresponds to the one Mr. Wells desc