ication according to the
system of Vauban. I poured over both works with much perseverance; and,
regarding them as admirable toy-books, set myself to construct, on a
very small scale, some of the toys with which they specially dealt. The
sea-shore in the immediate neighbourhood of the town appeared to my
inexperienced eye an excellent field for the carrying on of a campaign.
The sea-sand I found quite coherent enough, when still moistened by the
waters of the receding tide, to stand up in the form of towers and
bastions, and long lines of rampart; and there was one of the commonest
of the Littorinidae--_Littorina litoralis_, that in one of its varieties
is of a rich yellow colour, and in another of a bluish-green tint--which
supplied me with soldiers enough to execute all the evolutions figured
and described in the "Medley." The warmly-hued yellow shells represented
Britons in their scarlet--the more dingy ones, the French in their
uniforms of dirty blue; well-selected specimens of _Purpura lapillus_,
just tipped on their backs with a speck of paint, blue or red, from my
box, made capital dragoons; while a few dozens of the slender pyramidal
shells of _Turritella communis_ formed complete parks of artillery. With
such unlimited stores of the _materiel_ of war at my command, I was
enabled, more fortunate than Uncle Toby of old, to fight battles and
conduct retreats, assault and defend, build up fortifications, and then
batter them down again, at no expense at all; and the only drawback on
such a vast amount of advantage that I could at first perceive consisted
in the circumstance, that the shore was exceedingly open to observation,
and that my new amusements, when surveyed at a little distance, did
greatly resemble those of the very young children of the place, who used
to repair to the same arenaceous banks and shingle-beds, to bake
dirt-pies in the sand, or range lines of shells on little shelves of
stone, imitative of the crockery cupboard at home. Not only my
school-fellows, but also some of their parents, evidently arrived at the
conclusion that the two sets of amusements--mine and those of the little
children--were identical; for the elder folk said, that "in their time,
poor Francie had been such another boy, and every one saw what he had
come to;" while the younger, more energetic in their manifestations,
and more intolerant of folly, have even paused in their games of
marbles, or ceased spinning their tops, to hoo