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
level-crossings, 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.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Floor Games; a companion volume to
"Little Wars", by H. G. Wells

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