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 f