rge and Leonard, and was a
companion to both of them, but I do not think we made a trio as Leonard
and Horace and I did more or less. I have a clear recollection of
Leonard in a red fez, and bare legs covered with scratches, but I cannot
distinctly call up images of the others. I seem to remember a great deal
of purposeless wandering with my younger brothers; but with George,
playing was an organised affair in which I was an obedient subordinate,
as I have described in _Rustic Sounds_. Our chief game was playing at
soldiers; we had toy guns to which home-made wooden bayonets were fixed,
knapsacks, and I think shakos--whether we had any uniform coats I cannot
remember. In the cloakroom under the stairs our names and heights were
recorded, and George conscientiously constructed a short foot-rule so
that our height should come to something like six feet. I had to keep
sentry at the far end of the kitchen garden until released by a
bugle-call. George being a sergeant was exempt from sentry work, and was
merely responsible for the bugle-blowing. Indoors there was much playing
with tin soldiers. I remember a regiment of dragoons whose coats my
mother had laboriously reddened with sealing-wax to convert them into
British soldiers. The troopers were in a ferocious charging attitude
with swords raised, but the blades were mostly broken, and I innocently
believed that they were all raising crusts of bread to their mouths.
Another indoors game was the hurling of darts at one another in the long
passage upstairs; we had wooden shields on which the javelins used to
strike briskly enough, since they were weighted with lead. On these
occasions we were knights or men-at-arms, but out of doors we were
savages. George could hurl hazel-spears, using the Australian
throwing-stick, an art I never acquired, but I was fond of slinging
stones. To make a sling a bit of leather was necessary, and this meant a
visit to the village cobbler, Parker by name, who was a short, sallow man
with the bristling chin which, according to Dickens, {60} is the
universal attribute of cobblers. I remember the pleasure of sending,
with my sling, a pebble crashing into the big ash-tree in the field from
what seemed to me a great distance.

Another pursuit was walking on stilts, of which we had two kinds; on the
smaller ones even girls had been known to walk, but of the larger (which
I remember as of imposing height) only the male sex was capable. The