nder-nourished nurseries must needs fall back upon the Encyclopedia
Britannica, and even that is becoming flexible on India paper! But our
box of bricks almost satisfies. With our box of bricks we can scheme
and build, all three of us, for the best part of the hour, and still
have more bricks in the box.

So much now for the bricks. I will tell later how we use cartridge
paper and cardboard and other things to help in our and of the
decorative make of plasticine. Of course, it goes without saying that
we despise those foolish, expensive, made-up wooden and pasteboard
castles that are sold in shops--playing with them is like playing with
somebody else's dead game in a state of rigor mortis. Let me now say a
little about toy soldiers and the world to which they belong. Toy
soldiers used to be flat, small creatures in my own boyhood, in
comparison with the magnificent beings one can buy to-day. There has
been an enormous improvement in our national physique in this respect.
Now they stand nearly two inches high and look you broadly in the face,
and they have the movable arms and alert intelligence of scientifically
exercised men. You get five of them mounted or nine afoot in a box for
a small price. We three like those of British manufacture best; other
makes are of incompatible sizes, and we have a rule that saves much
trouble, that all red coats belong to G. P. W., and all other colored
coats to F. R. W., all gifts, bequests, and accidents notwithstanding.
Also we have sailors; but, since there are no red-coated sailors, blue
counts as red.

Then we have "beefeaters," (Footnote; The warders in the Tower of
London are called "beefeaters"; the origin of the term is obscure.)
Indians, Zulus, for whom there are special rules. We find we can buy
lead dogs, cats, lions, tigers, horses, camels, cattle, and elephants
of a reasonably corresponding size, and we have also several boxes of
railway porters, and some soldiers we bought in Hesse-Darmstadt that we
pass off on an unsuspecting home world as policemen. But we want
civilians very badly. We found a box of German from an exaggerated
curse of militarism, and even the grocer wears epaulettes. This might
please Lord Roberts and Mr. Leo Maxse, but it certainly does not please
us. I wish, indeed, that we could buy boxes of tradesmen: a blue
butcher, a white baker with a loaf of standard bread, a merchant or so;
boxes of servants, boxes of street traffic, smart sets, and so forth.