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THE JOLLIEST INDOOR GAMES for boys and girls demand a floor,

and the home that has no floor upon which games may be

played falls so far short of happiness. It must be a floor covered

with linoleum or cork carpet, so that toy soldiers and

such-like will stand up upon it, and of a color and surface

that will take and show chalk marks; the common greencolored

cork carpet without a pattern is the best of all. It

must be no highway to other rooms, and well lit and airy.

Occasionally, alas! it must be scrubbed—and then a truce to

Floor Games. Upon such a floor may be made an infinitude

of imaginative games, not only keeping boys and girls happy

for days together, but building up a framework of spacious

and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The men of tomorrow

will gain new strength from nursery floors. I am going

to tell of some of these games and what is most needed to

play them; I have tried them all and a score of others like

them with my sons, and all of the games here illustrated

have been set out by us. I am going to tell of them here

because I think what we have done will interest other fathers

and mothers, and perhaps be of use to them (and to uncles

and such-like tributary sub-species of humanity) in buying

presents for their own and other people’s children.

Now, the toys we play with time after time, and in a thousand

permutations and combinations, belong to four main

groups. We have (1) SOLDIERS, and with these I class sailors,

railway porters, civilians, and the lower animals generally,

such as I will presently describe in greater detail; (2) BRICKS;

(3) BOARDS and PLANKS; and (4) a lot of CLOCKWORK

RAILWAY ROLLING-STOCK AND RAILS. Also there are

certain minor objects—tin ships, Easter eggs, and the like—

of which I shall make incidental mention, that like the kiwi

and the duck-billed platypus refuse to be classified.

These we arrange and rearrange in various ways upon our

floor, making a world of them. In doing so we have found

out all sorts of pleasant facts, and also many undesirable

possibilities; and very probably our experience will help a

reader here and there to the former and save him from the

latter. For instance, our planks and boards, and what one

can do with them, have been a great discovery. Lots of boys

and girls seem to be quite without planks and boards at all,

and there is no regular trade in them. The toyshops, we found,

did not keep anything of the kind we wanted, and our boards,

which we had to get made by a carpenter, are the basis of

half the games we play. The planks and boards we have are

of various sizes. We began with three of two yards by one;

they were made with cross pieces like small doors; but these

we found unnecessarily large, and we would not get them

now after our present experience. The best thickness, we

think, is an inch for the larger sizes and three-quarters and a

half inch for the smaller; and the best sizes are a yard square,

thirty inches square, two feet, and eighteen inches square—

one or two of each, and a greater number of smaller ones, 18

x 9, 9 x 9, and 9 x 4-1/2. With the larger ones we make

islands and archipelagos on our floor while the floor is a sea,

or we make a large island or a couple on the Venice pattern,

or we pile the smaller on the larger to make hills when the

floor is a level plain, or they roof in railway stations or serve

as bridges, in such manner as I will presently illustrate. And

these boards of ours pass into our next most important possession,

which is our box of bricks.

(But I was nearly forgetting to tell this, that all the thicker

and larger of these boards have holes bored through them.

At about every four inches is a hole, a little larger than an

ordinary gimlet hole. These holes have their uses, as I will

tell later, but now let me get on to the box of bricks.)

This, again, wasn’t a toy-shop acquisition. It came to us by

gift from two generous friends, unhappily growing up and

very tall at that; and they had it from parents who were one

of several families who shared in the benefit of a Good Uncle.

I know nothing certainly of this man except that he was a

Radford of Plymouth. I have never learned nor cared to learn

of his commoner occupations, but certainly he was one of

those shining and distinguished uncles that tower up at times

above the common levels of humanity. At times, when we

consider our derived and undeserved share of his inheritance

and count the joys it gives us, we have projected half in

jest and half in earnest the putting together of a little exemplary

book upon the subject of such exceptional men: Celebrated

Uncles, it should be called; and it should stir up all

who read it to some striving at least towards the glories of

the avuncular crown. What this great benefactor did was to

engage a deserving unemployed carpenter through an entire

winter making big boxes of wooden bricks for the almost

innumerable nephews and nieces with which an appreciative

circle of brothers and sisters had blessed him. There are

whole bricks 4-1/2 inches x 2-1/4 x 1-1/8; and there are

quarters—called by those previous owners (who have now

ascended to, we hope but scarcely believe, a happier life near

the ceiling) “piggys.” You note how these sizes fit into the

sizes of the boards, and of each size—we have never counted

them, but we must have hundreds. We can pave a dozen

square yards of floor with them.

How utterly we despise the silly little bricks of the toyshops!

They are too small to make a decent home for even the poorest

lead soldiers, even if there were hundreds of them, and there

are never enough, never nearly enough; even if you take one

at a time and lay it down and say, “This is a house,” even

then there are not enough. We see rich people, rich people

out of motor cars, rich people beyond the dreams of avarice,

going into toyshops and buying these skimpy, sickly, ridiculous

pseudo-boxes of bricklets, because they do not know

what to ask for, and the toyshops are just the merciless mercenary

enemies of youth and happiness —so far, that is, as

bricks are concerned. Their unfortunate under-parented offspring

mess about with these gifts, and don’t make very much

of them, and put them away; and you see their consequences

in after life in the weakly-conceived villas and silly suburbs

that people have built all round big cities. Such poor undernourished

nurseries must needs fall back upon the Encyclopedia

Britannica, and even that is becoming flexible on India

paper! But our box of bricks almost satisfies. With our box of

bricks we can scheme and build, all three of us, for the best

part of the hour, and still have more bricks in the box.

So much now for the bricks. I will tell later how we use

cartridge paper and cardboard and other things to help in

our and of the decorative make of plasticine. Of course, it

goes without saying that we despise those foolish, expensive,

made-up wooden and pasteboard castles that are sold in

shops—playing with them is like playing with somebody

else’s dead game in a state of rigor mortis. Let me now say a

little about toy soldiers and the world to which they belong.

Toy soldiers used to be flat, small creatures in my own boyhood,

in comparison with the magnificent beings one can buy

to-day. There has been an enormous improvement in our national

physique in this respect. Now they stand nearly two

inches high and look you broadly in the face, and they have

the movable arms and alert intelligence of scientifically exercised

men. You get five of them mounted or nine afoot in a

box for a small price. We three like those of British manufacture

best; other makes are of incompatible sizes, and we have a

rule that saves much trouble, that all red coats belong to G. P.

W., and all other colored coats to F. R. W., all gifts, bequests,

and accidents notwithstanding. Also we have sailors; but, since

there are no red-coated sailors, blue counts as red.

Then we have “beefeaters,” (Footnote; The warders in the

Tower of London are called “beefeaters”; the origin of the

term is obscure.) Indians, Zulus, for whom there are special

rules. We find we can buy lead dogs, cats, lions, tigers, horses,

camels, cattle, and elephants of a reasonably corresponding

size, and we have also several boxes of railway porters, and

some soldiers we bought in Hesse-Darmstadt that we pass

off on an unsuspecting home world as policemen. But we

want civilians very badly. We found a box of German from

an exaggerated curse of militarism, and even the grocer wears

epaulettes. This might please Lord Roberts and Mr. Leo

Maxse, but it certainly does not please us. I wish, indeed,

that we could buy boxes of tradesmen: a blue butcher, a white

baker with a loaf of standard bread, a merchant or so; boxes

of servants, boxes of street traffic, smart sets, and so forth.

We could do with a judge and lawyers, or a box of vestrymen.

It is true that we can buy Salvation Army lasses and football

players, but we are cold to both of these. We have, of course,

boy scouts. With such boxes of civilians we could have much

more fun than with the running, marching, swashbuckling

soldiery that pervades us. They drive us to reviews; and it is

only emperors, kings, and very silly small boys who can take

an undying interest in uniforms and reviews.

And lastly, of our railways, let me merely remark here that

we have always insisted upon one uniform gauge and everything

we buy fits into and develops our existing railway system.

Nothing is more indicative of the wambling sort of parent

and a coterie of witless, worthless uncles than a heap of

railway toys of different gauges and natures in the children’s

playroom. And so, having told you of the material we have,

let me now tell you of one or two games (out of the innumerable

many) that we have played. Of course, in this I have

to be a little artificial. Actual games of the kind I am illustrating

here have been played by us, many and many a time,

with joy and happy invention and no thought of publication.

They have gone now, those games, into that vaguely

luminous and iridescent into which happiness have tried out

again points in world of memories all love-engendering must

go. But we our best to set them and recall the good them

here.

Section II

THE GAME OF THE WONDERFUL
ISLANDS

IN THIS GAME the floor is the sea. Half—rather the larger half

because of some instinctive right of primogeniture—is assigned

to the elder of my two sons (he is, as it were, its Olympian),

and the other half goes to his brother. We distribute

our boards about the sea in an archipelagic manner. We then

dress our islands, objecting strongly to too close a scrutiny of

our proceedings until we have done. Here, in the illustration,

is such an archipelago ready for its explorers, or rather

on the verge of exploration. There are altogether four islands,

two to the reader’s right and two to the left, and the nearer

ones are the more northerly; it is as many as we could get

into the camera. The northern island to the right is most

advanced in civilization, and is chiefly temple. That temple

has a flat roof, diversified by domes made of half Easter eggs

and cardboard cones. These are surmounted by decorative

work of a flamboyant character in plasticine, designed by G.

P. W. An oriental population crowds the courtyard and pours

out upon the roadway. Note the grotesque plasticine monsters

who guard the portals, also by G. P. W., who had a free

hand with the architecture of this remarkable specimen of

eastern religiosity. They are nothing, you may be sure, to the

gigantic idols inside, out of the reach of the sacrilegious camera.

To the right is a tropical thatched hut. The thatched

roof is really that nice ribbed paper that comes round

bottles—a priceless boon to these games. All that comes into

the house is saved for us. The owner of the hut lounges outside

the door. He is a dismounted cavalry-corps man, and he

owns one cow. His fence, I may note, belonged to a little

wooden farm we bought in Switzerland. Its human inhabitants

are scattered; its beasts follow a precarious living as wild

guinea-pigs on the islands to the south.

Your attention is particularly directed to the trees about

and behind the temple, which thicken to a forest on the further

island to the right. These trees we make of twigs taken

from trees and bushes in the garden, and stuck into holes in

our boards. Formerly we lived in a house with a little wood

close by, and our forests were wonderful. Now we are restricted

to our garden, and we could get nothing for this set

out but jasmine and pear. Both have wilted a little, and are

not nearly such spirited trees as you can make out of fir trees,

for instance. It is for these woods chiefly that we have our

planks perforated with little holes. No tin trees can ever be

so plausible and various and jolly as these. With a good garden

to draw upon one can make terrific sombre woods, and

then lie down and look through them at lonely horsemen or

wandering beasts.

That further island on the right is a less settled country

than the island of the temple. Camels, you note, run wild

there; there is a sort of dwarf elephant, similar to the now

extinct kind of which one finds skeletons in Malta, pigs, a

red parrot, and other such creatures, of lead and wood. The

pear-trees are fine. It is those which have attracted white settlers

(I suppose they are), whose thatched huts are to be seen

both upon the beach and in-land. By the huts on the beach

lie a number of pear-tree logs; but a raid of negroid savages

from the to the left is in the only settler is the man in a

adjacent island progress, and clearly visible rifleman’s uniform

running inland for help. Beyond, peeping out among

the trees, are the supports he seeks.

These same negroid savages are as bold as they are ferocious.

They cross arms of the sea upon their rude canoes,

made simply of a strip of cardboard. Their own island, the

one to the south-left, is a rocky wilderness containing caves.

Their chief food is the wild-goat, but in pursuit of these creatures

you will also sometimes find the brown bear, who sits—

he is small but perceptible to the careful student—in the

mouth of his cave. Here, too, you will distinguish small guinea

pig-like creatures of wood, in happier days the inhabitants

of that Swiss farm. Sunken rocks off this island are indicated

by a white foam which takes the form of letters, and you will

also note a whirlpool between the two islands to the right.

Finally comes the island nearest to the reader on the left.

This also is wild and rocky, inhabited not by negroid blacks,

but by Indians, whose tents, made by F. R. W. out of ordinary

brown paper and adorned with chalk totems of a rude

and characteristic kind, pour forth their fierce and well-armed

inhabitants at the intimation of an invader. The rocks on

this island, let me remark, have great mineral wealth. Among

them are to be found not only sheets and veins of silver paper,

but great nuggets of metal, obtained by the melting down

of hopelessly broken soldiers in an iron spoon. Note, too,

the peculiar and romantic shell beach of this country. It is an

island of exceptional interest to the geologist and scientific

explorer. The Indians, you observe, have domesticated one

leaden and one wooden cow.

This is how the game would be set out. Then we build

ships and explore these islands, but in these pictures the ships

are represented as already arriving. The ships are built out of

our wooden bricks on flat keels made of two wooden pieces

of 9 x 4-1/2; inches, which are very convenient to push about

over the floor. Captain G. P. W. is steaming into the bay

between the eastern and western islands. He carries heavy

guns, his ship bristles with an extremely aggressive soldiery,

who appear to be blazing away for the mere love of the thing.

(I suspect him of Imperialist intentions.) Captain F. R. W. is

apparently at anchor between his northern and southern islands.

His ship is of a slightly more pacific type. I note on his

deck a lady and a gentleman (of German origin) with a bag,

two of our all too rare civilians. No doubt the bag contains

samples and a small conversation dictionary in the negroid

dialects. (I think F. R. W. may turn out to be a Liberal.)

Perhaps he will sail on and rescue the raided huts, perhaps

he will land and build a jetty, and begin mining among the

rocks to fill his hold with silver. Perhaps the natives will kill

and eat the gentleman with the bag. All that is for Captain F.

R. W. to decide.

You see how the game goes on. We land and alter things,

and build and rearrange, and hoist paper flags on pins, and

subjugate populations, and confer all the blessings of civilization

upon these lands. We keep them going for days. And

at last, as we begin to tire of them, comes the scrubbing

brush, and we must burn our trees and dismantle our islands,

and put our soldiers in the little nests of drawers, and

stand the island boards up against the wall, and put everything

away. Then perhaps, after a few days, we begin upon

some other such game, just as we feel disposed. But it is

never quite the same game, never. Another time it may be

wildernesses for example, and the boards are hills, and never

a drop of water is to be found except for the lakes and rivers

we may mark out in chalk. But after one example others are

easy, and next I will tell you of our way of making towns.

Section III

OF THE BUILDING OF CITIES

WE ALWAYS BUILD TWIN CITIES, like London and Westminster,

or Buda-Pesth, because two of us always want, both of them,

to be mayors and municipal councils, and it makes for local

freedom and happiness to arrange it so; but when steam railways

or street railways are involved we have our rails in common,

and we have an excellent law that rails must be laid down

and switches kept open in such a manner that anyone feeling

so disposed of may send a through train from their own station

back to their own station again without needless negotiation

or the personal invasion of anybody else’s administrative area.

It is an undesirable thing to have other people bulging over

one’s housing, standing in one’s open spaces, and, in extreme

cases, knocking down and even treading on one’s citizens. It

leads at times to explanations that are afterward regretted.

We always have twin cities, or at the utmost stage of coalescence

a city with two wards, Red End and Blue End; we

mark the boundaries very carefully, and our citizens have so

much local patriotism (Mr. Chesterton will learn with plea

sure) that they stray but rarely over that thin little streak of

white that bounds their municipal allegiance. Sometimes we

have an election for mayor; it is like a census but very abusive,

and Red always wins. Only citizens with two legs and at

least one arm and capable of standing up may vote, and voters

may poll on horseback; boy scouts and women and children

do not vote, though there is a vigorous agitation to

remove these disabilities. Zulus and foreign-looking persons,

such as East Indian cavalry and American Indians, are also

disfranchised. So are riderless horses and camels; but the elephant

has never attempted to vote on any occasion, and

does not seem to desire the privilege. It influences public

opinion quite sufficiently as it is by nodding its head.

We have set out and I have photographed one of our cities

to illustrate more clearly the amusement of the game. Red

End is to the reader’s right, and includes most of the hill on

which the town stands, a shady zoological garden, the town

hall, a railway tunnel through the hill, a museum (away in

the extreme right-hand corner), a church, a rifle range, and a

shop. Blue End has the railway station, four or five shops,

several homes, a hotel, and a farm-house, close to the railway

station. The boundary drawn by me as overlord (who

also made the hills and tunnels and appointed the trees to

grow) runs irregularly between the two shops nearest the

cathedral, over the shoulder in front of the town hall, and

between the farm and the rifle range.

The nature of the hills I have already explained, and this

time we have had no lakes or ornamental water. These are

very easily made out of a piece of glass—the glass lid of a box

for example—laid upon silver paper. Such water becomes

very readily populated by those celluloid seals and swans and

ducks that are now so common. Paper fish appear below the

surface and may be peered at by the curious. But on this

occasion we have nothing of the kind, nor have we made use

of a green-colored tablecloth we sometimes use to drape our

hills. Of course, a large part of the fun of this game lies in the

witty incorporation of all sorts of extraneous objects. But

the incorporation must be witty, or you may soon convert

the whole thing into an incoherent muddle of half-good ideas.

I have taken two photographs, one to the right and one to

the left of this agreeable place. I may perhaps adopt a kind of

guide-book style in reviewing its principal features: I begin

at the railway station. I have made a rather nearer and larger

photograph of the railway station, which presents a diversified

and entertaining scene to the incoming visitor. Porters

(out of a box of porters) career here and there with the trucks

and light baggage. Quite a number of our all-too-rare civilians

parade the platform: two gentlemen, a lady, and a small

but evil-looking child are particularly noticeable; and there

is a wooden sailor with jointed legs, in a state of intoxication

as reprehensible as it is nowadays happily rare. Two virtuous

dogs regard his abandon with quiet scorn. The seat on which

he sprawls is a broken piece of some toy whose nature I have

long forgotten, the station clock is a similar fragment, and

so is the metallic pillar which bears the name of the station.

So many toys, we find, only become serviceable with a little

smashing. There is an allegory in this—as Hawthorne used

to write in his diary.

(“What is he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds

by the river?”)

The fences at the ends of the platforms are pieces of wood

belonging to the game of Matador—that splendid and very

educational construction game, hailing, I believe, from Hungary.

There is also, I regret to say, a blatant advertisement of

Jab’s “Hair Color,” showing the hair. (In the photograph the

hair does not come out very plainly.) This is by G. P. W.,

who seems marked out by destiny to be the advertisementwriter

of the next generation. He spends much of his scanty

leisure inventing and drawing advertisements of imaginary

commodities. Oblivious to many happy, beautiful, and noble

things in life, he goes about studying and imitating the literature

of the billboards. He and his brother write newspapers

almost entirely devoted to these annoying appeals. You

will note, too, the placard at the mouth of the railway tunnel

urging the existence of Jinks’ Soap upon the passing traveller.

The oblong object on the placard represents, no doubt,

a cake of this offensive and aggressive commodity. The zoological

garden flaunts a placard, “Zoo, two cents pay,” and

the grocer’s picture of a cabbage with “Get Them” is not to

be ignored. F. R. W. is more like the London County Council

in this respect, and prefers bare walls.

“Returning from the station,” as the guide-books say, and

“giving one more glance” at the passengers who are waiting

for the privilege of going round the circle in open cars and

returning in a prostrated condition to the station again, and

“observing” what admirable platforms are made by our 9 x 4-

1/2 pieces, we pass out to the left into the village street. A

motor omnibus (a one-horse hospital cart in less progressive

days) stands waiting for passengers; and, on our way to the

Cherry Tree Inn, we remark two nurses, one in charge of a

child with a plasticine head. The landlord of the inn is a small

grotesque figure of plaster; his sign is fastened on by a pin. No

doubt the refreshment supplied here has an enviable reputation,

to judge by the alacrity with which a number of riflemen

move to-wards the door. The inn, by the by, like the station

and some private houses, is roofed with stiff paper.

These stiff-paper roofs are one of our great inventions. We

get After the game is over, we put these roofs inside one another

and stick them into the bookshelves. The roof one folds

and puts away will live to roof another day.

Proceeding on our way past the Cherry Tree, and resisting

cosy invitation of its portals, we come to the shopping quarter

of the town. The stock in windows is made by hand out

of plasticine. We note the meat and hams of “Mr. Woddy,”

the cabbages and carrots of “Tod & Brothers,” the general

activities of the “Jokil Co.” shopmen. It is de rigueur with

our shop assistants that they should wear white helmets. In

the street, boy scouts go to and fro, a wagon clatters by; most

of the adult population is about its business, and a red-coated

band plays along the roadway. Contrast this animated scene

with the mysteries of sea and forest, rock and whirlpool, in

our previous game. Further on is the big church or cathedral.

It is built in an extremely debased Gothic style; it reminds

us most of a church we once surveyed during a brief

visit to Rotterdam on our way up the Rhine. A solitary boy

scout, mindful of the views of Lord Haldane, enters its high

portal. Passing the cathedral, we continue to the museum.

This museum is no empty boast; it contains mineral specimens,

shells—such great shells as were found on the beaches

of our previous game—the Titanic skulls of extinct rabbits

and cats, and other such wonders. The slender curious may

lie down on the floor and peep in at the windows.

“We now,” says the guide-book, “retrace our steps to the

shops, and then, turning to the left, ascend under the trees

up the terraced hill on which stands the Town Hall. This

magnificent building is surmounted by a colossal statue of a

chamois, the work of a Wengen artist; it is in two stories, with

a battlemented roof, and a crypt (entrance to right of steps)

used for the incarceration of offenders. It is occupied by the

town guard, who wear ‘beefeater’ costumes of ancient origin.”

Note the red parrot perched on the battlements; it lives

tame in the zoological gardens, and is of the same species as

one we formerly observed in our archipelago. Note, too, the

brisk cat-and-dog encounter below. Steps descend in wide

flights down the hillside into Blue End. The two couchant

lions on either side of the steps are in plasticine, and were

executed by that versatile artist, who is also mayor of Red

End, G. P. W. He is present. Our photographer has hit upon

a happy moment in the history of this town, and a conversation

of the two mayors is going on upon the terrace before

the palace. F. R. W., mayor of Blue End, stands on the steps

in the costume of an admiral; G. P. W. is on horseback (his

habits are equestrian) on the terrace. The town guard parades

in their honor, and up the hill a number of musicians

(a little hidden by trees) ride on gray horses towards them.

Passing in front of the town hall, and turning to the right,

we approach the zoological gardens. Here we pass two of our

civilians: a gentleman in black, a lady, and a large boy scout,

presumably their son. We enter the gardens, which are protected

by a bearded janitor, and remark at once a band of

three performing dogs, who are, as the guide-book would

say, “discoursing sweet music.” In neither ward of the city

does there seem to be the slightest restraint upon the use of

musical instruments. It is no place for neurotic people.

The gardens contain the inevitable elephants, camels (which

we breed, and which are therefore in considerable numbers),

a sitting bear, brought from last game’s caves, goats from the

same region, tamed and now running loose in the gardens,

dwarf elephants, wooden nondescripts, and other rare creatures.

The keepers wear a uniform not unlike that of railway

guards and porters. We wander through the gardens, return,

descend the hill by the school of musketry, where soldiers

are to be seen shooting at the butts, pass through the paddock

of the old farm, and so return to the railway station,

extremely gratified by all we have seen, and almost equally

divided in our minds between the merits and attractiveness

of either ward. A clockwork train comes clattering into the

station, we take our places, somebody hoots or whistles for

the engine (which can’t), the signal is knocked over in the

excitement of the moment, the train starts, and we “wave a

long, regretful farewell to the salubrious cheerfulness of

Chamois City.”

You see now how we set out and the spirit in which we set

out our towns. It demands but the slightest exercise of the

imagination to devise a hundred additions and variations of

the scheme. You can make picture-galleries—great fun for

small boys who can draw; you can make factories; you can

plan out flower-gardens—which appeals very strongly to

intelligent little girls; your town hall may become a fortified

castle; or you may put the whole town on boards and make

a Venice of it, with ships and boats upon its canals, and bridges

across them. We used to have some very serviceable ships of

cardboard, with flat bottoms; and then we used to have a

harbor, and the ships used to sail away to distant rooms, and

even into the garden, and return with the most remarkable

cargoes, loads of nasturtium-stem logs, for example. We had

sacks then, made of glove-fingers, and several toy cranes. I

suppose we could find most of these again if we hunted for

them. Once, with this game fresh in our we went to see the

docks, which struck us as just our old harbor game magnified.

“I say, Daddy,” said one of us in a quiet corner, wistfully,

as one who speaks knowingly against the probabilities of the

case, and yet with a faint, thin hope, “couldn’t we play just

for a little with these sacks … until some-body comes?”

Of course the setting-out of the city is half the game. Then

you devise incidents. As I wanted to photograph the particular

set-out for the purpose of illustrating this account, I

took a larger share in the arrangement than I usually do. It

was necessary to get everything into the picture, to ensure a

light background that would throw up some of the trees,

prevent too much overlapping, and things like that. When

the photographing was over, matters became more normal. I

left the schoolroom, and when I returned I found that the

group of riflemen which had been converging on the

publichouse had been sharply recalled to duty, and were trotting

in a disciplined, cheerless way towards the railway station.

The elephant had escaped from the zoo into the Blue

Ward, and was being marched along by a military patrol.

The originally scattered boy scouts were being paraded. G.

P. W. had demolished the shop of the Jokil Company, and

was building a Red End station near the bend. The stock of

the Jokil Company had passed into the hands of the adjacent

storekeepers. Then the town hall ceremonies came to

an end and the guard marched off. Then G. P. W. demolished

the rifle-range, and ran a small branch of the urban

railway uphill to the town hall door, and on into the zoological

gardens. This was only the beginning of a period of

enterprise in transit, a small railway boom. A number of halts

of simple construction sprang up. There was much making

of railway tickets, of a size that enabled passengers to stick

their heads through the middle and wear them as a Mexican

does his blanket. Then a battery of artillery turned up in the

High Street and there was talk of fortifications. Suppose wild

Indians were to turn up across the plains to the left and attack

the town! Fate still has toy drawers untouched. . .

So things will go on till putting-away night on Friday. Then

we shall pick up the roofs and shove them away among the

books, return the clockwork engines very carefully to their

boxes, for engines are fragile things, stow the soldiers and

civilians and animals in their nests of drawers, burn the trees

again—this time they are sweet-bay; and all the joys and

sorrows and rivalries and successes of Blue End and Red End

will pass, and follow Carthage and Nineveh, the empire of

Aztec and Roman, the arts of Etruria and the palaces of Crete,

and the plannings and contrivings of innumerable myriads

of children, into the limbo of games exhausted . . . it may be,

leaving some profit, in thoughts widened, in strengthened

apprehensions; it may be, leaving nothing but a memory

that dies.

SECTION IV

FUNICULARS, MARBLE TOWERS,
CASTLES AND WAR GAMES, BUT VERY
LITTLE OF WAR GAMES

I HAVE NOW GIVEN TWO GENERAL TYPES of floor game; but

these are only just two samples of delightful and imagination-

stirring variations that can be contrived out of the toys

I have described. I will now glance rather more shortly at

some other very good uses of the floor, the boards, the bricks,

the soldiers, and the railway system—that pentagram for exorcising

the evil spirit of dulness from the lives of little boys

and girls. And first, there is a kind of lark we call Funiculars.

There are times when islands cease somehow to dazzle, and

towns and cities are too orderly and uneventful and cramped

for us, and we want something—something to whizz. Then

we say: “Let us make a funicular. Let us make a funicular

more than we have ever done. Let us make one to reach up

to the table.” We dispute whether it isn’t a mountain railway

we are after. The bare name is refreshing; it takes us back to

that unforgettable time when we all went to Wengen, winding

in and out and up and up the mountain side—from

slush, to such snow and sunlight as we had never seen before.

And we make a mountain railway. So far, we have never

got it up to the table, but some day we will, Then we will

have a station there on the flat, and another station on the

floor, with shunts and sidings to each.

The peculiar joy of the mountain railway is that, if it is

properly made, a loaded car—not a toy engine; it is too rough

a game for delicate, respectable engines—will career from

top to bottom of the system, and go this way and that as

your cunningly-arranged switches determine; and afterwards—

and this is a wonderful and distinctive discovery—

you can send it back by ‘lectric.

What is a ‘lectric? You may well ask. ‘Lectrics were invented

almost by accident, by one of us, to whom also the name is

due. It came out of an accident to a toy engine; a toy engine

that seemed done for and that was yet full of life.

You know, perhaps, what a toy engine is like. It has the

general appearance of a railway engine; funnels, buffers, cab,

and so forth. All these are very elegant things, no doubt; but

they do not make for lightness, they do not facilitate hill

climbing. Now, sometimes an engine gets its clockwork out

of order, and then it is over and done for; but sometimes it is

merely the outer semblance that is injured—the funnel bent,

the body twisted. You remove the things and, behold ! you

have bare clockwork on wheels, an apparatus of almost malignant

energy, soul without body, a kind of metallic rage.

This it was that our junior member instantly knew for a

‘lectric, and loved from the moment of its stripping.

(I have, by the by, known a very serviceable little road ‘lectric

made out of a clockwork mouse.)

Well, when we have got chairs and boxes and bricks, and

graded our line skilfully and well, easing the descent, and being

very careful of the joining at the bends for fear that the

descending trucks and cars will jump the rails, we send down

first an empty truck, then trucks loaded with bricks and lead

soldiers, and then the ‘lectric; and then afterwards the sturdy

‘lectric shoves up the trucks again to the top, with a kind of

savagery of purpose and a whizz that is extremely gratifying to

us. We make switches in these lines; we make them have levelcrossings,

at which collisions are always being just averted; the

lines go over and under each other, and in and out of tunnels.

The marble tower, again, is a great building, on which we

devise devious slanting ways down which marbles run. I do

not know why it is amusing to make a marble run down a

long intricate path, and dollop down steps, and come almost

but not quite to a stop, and rush out of dark places and

across little bridges of card: it is, and we often do it.

Castles are done with bricks and cardboard turrets and a

portcullis of card, and drawbridge and moats; they are a mere

special sort of city-building, done because we have a box of

men in armor. We could reconstruct all sorts of historical

periods if the toy soldier makers would provide us with

people. But at present, as I have already complained, they

make scarcely anything but contemporary fighting men. And

of the war game I must either write volumes or nothing. For

the present let it be nothing. Some day, perhaps, I will write

a great book about the war game and tell of battles and campaigns

and strategy and tactics. But this time I set out merely

to tell of the ordinary joys of playing with the floor, and to

gird improvingly and usefully at toymakers. So much, I think,

I have done. If one parent or one uncle buys the wiselier for

me, I shall not altogether have lived in vain.