eemed to understand anything whatever of
the political Systems across which she came to me. Also she forbade all
toys on Sundays except the bricks for church-building and the soldiers
for church parade, or a Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark
mixed up with a wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know
whether a thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with
cannon, and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear
of God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of
ark rather elaborately done.

Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of the
pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen. You made
your beasts--which were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceived
as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from which
they went down a cardboard slide four at a time, and dropped most
satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep steps
to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah) strung a cotton loop round their
legs and sent them by pin hooks along a wire to a second slaughterman
with a chipped foot (formerly Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly,
converted them into Army sausage by means of a portion of the inside of
an old alarum clock.

My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore
bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my mother
disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my little chair
and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable understanding and
sympathy.

It was he who gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most
of my ideas. "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable for
roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper that
is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you see the tiger
loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your cattle ranch." And I
would find a bright new lead tiger like a special creation at large in
the world, and demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effort
to get him safely housed in the city menagerie beside the captured
dragon crocodile, tamed now, and his key lost and the heart and spring
gone out of him.

And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the inestimable
blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood except those of
Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for himself and me from
the Broms