ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out
into the hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun
emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And there
was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of nasturtium
seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike 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 waggons along
the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian
frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were
battles on the way.
That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget by
what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--I have
never seen such soldiers since--and for these my father helped me to
make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a hitherto desolate
country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of an ancient trunk. Then
I conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no doubt
through contact with civilisation--one my mother trod on--and their
land became a wilderness again and was ravaged for a time by a clockwork
crocodile of vast proportions.) And out towards the coal-scuttle was a
region near the impassable thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived
certain china Zulus brandishing spears, and a mountain country of
rudely piled bricks concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and
several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of
survivors from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently
invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the uncultivated
wildness of this region further by trees of privet-twigs from the garden
hedge and box from the garden borders. By these territories went
my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in the
oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hills--one tunnel was three
volumes long--defended as occasion required by camps of paper tents
or brick blockhouses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineered
ascent to a fortress on the cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and
developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion and
now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve. I
played them intermittently, and they bulk now in t
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