 This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. Floor Games by H. G. Wells Section 1. The Toys to Have The jolliest indoor games for boys and girls demand a floor. And the home that has no floor upon which games may be played falls so far short of happiness. It must be a floor covered with linoleum or cork carpet, so that toy soldiers and such like will stand up upon it, and of a color and surface that will take and show chalk marks. The common green-colored cork carpet without a pattern is the best of all. It must be no highway to other rooms, and well-lit and airy. Occasionally, alas! it must be scrubbed, and then a truce to floor games. Upon such a floor may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of spacious and inspiring ideas in them for afterlife. The men of tomorrow will gain new strength from nursery floors. I am going to tell of some of these games and what is most needed to play them. I have tried them all, and a score of others like them with my sons, and all of the games here illustrated have been set out by us. I am going to tell of them here because I think what we have done will interest other fathers and mothers, and perhaps be of use to them, and to uncles and such like tributary subspecies of humanity, and buying presents for their own and other people's children. Now, the toys we play with time after time and in a thousand permutations and combinations belong to four main groups. We have, one, soldiers, and with these I-class sailors, railway porters, civilians, and the lower animals generally, such as I will presently describe in greater detail. Two, bricks. Three, boards and planks. And four, 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 Duckbill 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 toy shops 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. We 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, eighteen by nine, nine by nine, and nine by four and a half. 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 from two generous friends, unhappily growing up in very tall at that, and they had it from parents who were one of several families who shared in the benefit of a good uncle. I know nothing, certainly, of this man, except that he was a Radford of Plymouth. I have never learned nor cared to learn of his commoner occupations, but certainly he was one of those shining and distinguished uncles that tower up at times above the common levels of humanity. At times, when we consider our derived and undeserved share of his inheritance and count the joys it gives us, we have projected half in jest and half in earnest the putting together of a little exemplary book upon the subject of such exceptional men. Celebrated uncles, it should be called, and it should stir up all who read it to some striving at least towards the glories of the avuncular crown. What this great benefactor did was to engage a deserving unemployed carpenter through an entire winter making big boxes of wooden bricks for the almost innumerable nephews and nieces with which an appreciative circle of brothers and sisters that blessed him. There are whole bricks four and a half inches by two and a quarter, by one and an eighth, and there are quarters, called by those previous owners, who have now ascended to, we hope would scarcely believe, a happier life near the ceiling. Piggies! You note how these sizes fit into the sizes of the boards, and of each size we have never counted them, but we must have hundreds. We can pave a dozen square yards of floor with them. How utterly we despise the silly little bricks of the toy shops. They are too small to make a decent home for even the poorest-led soldiers, even if there were hundreds of them, and there are never enough, never nearly enough. Even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say, this is a house. Even then there are not enough. We see rich people, rich people out of motor-cars, rich people beyond the dreams of avarice, going into toy shops and buying these skimpy, sickly, ridiculous, pseudo-boxes of bricklets, because they do not know what to ask for, and the toy shops are just the merciless mercenary enemies of youth and happiness. So far that is, as bricks are concerned. They're unfortunate under-parented offspring mess about with these gifts and don't make very much of them and put them away. And you see their consequences in afterlife and the weakly-conceived villas and silly suburbs that people have built all round big cities. Such poor, undernourished 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 game and of the decorative make of plasticine. Of course it goes without saying that we despise those foolish, expensive, made-up wooden and paste-board castles that are sold in shops. Playing with them is like playing with someone else's dead game in a state of rigor morris. 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 today. 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 a foot 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 redcoats belong to GPW and all other colored coats to FRW. All gifts, bequests, and accidents notwithstanding. Also we have sailors, but since there are no redcoated sailors, blue counts is red. Then we have bee-feeders, footnote. The waters and the Tower of London are called bee-feeders. 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 homeworld as policemen. But we want civilians very badly. We found a box of Germans from an exaggerated curse of militarism, and even the grocer wears epaulets. This might please Lord Roberts and Mr. Leo Maxi, 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. We could do with a judge and lawyers, or a box of vestrymen. It is true that we can buy Salvation Army Lasses and football players, but we are cold to both of these. We have, of course, Boy Scouts. With such boxes of civilians we could have much more fun than with the running, marching, swashbuckling soldiery that pervades us. They drive us to reviews, and it is only emperors, kings, and very silly small boys who can take an undying interest in uniforms and reviews. And lastly, of our railways, let me merely remark here that we have always insisted upon one uniform gauge, and everything we buy fits into and develops our existing railway system. Nothing is more indicative of the rambling sort of parent and a coterie of witless, worthless uncles than a heap of railway toys of different gauges and natures in the children's playroom. And so, having told you of the material we have, let me now tell you of one or two games out of the innumerable many that we have played. Of course, in this I have to be a little artificial. Actual games of the Kaimai and illustrating here have been played by us many and many a time with joy and happy invention and no thought of publication. They have gone now, those games, into that vaguely luminous and iridescent world of memories where all love and gendering happiness must go, but we do our best to set them there and recall the good in them here. Section 2 The Game of the Wonderful Islands In this game the floor is the sea. Half, rather the larger half because of some instinctive right of promogenity, is assigned to the elder of my two sons. He is, as it were, its Olympian. And the other half goes to his brother. We distribute our boards about the sea in an archipelagic manner. We then dress our islands, objecting strongly to too close a scrutiny of our proceedings until we have done. Here in the illustration is such an archipelago ready for its explorers or rather on the verge of exploration. There are altogether four islands, two to the reader's right and two to the left, and the nearer ones are the more northerly. It is as many as we could get into the camera. The northern island to the right is most advanced in civilization and is chiefly temple. That temple has a flat roof, diversified by domes made of half easter eggs and cardboard cones. These are surmounted by decorative work of a flamboyant character in Plasticine designed by GPW. An oriental population crowds the courtyard and pours out upon the roadway. Note the grotesque Plasticine monsters guard the portals, also by GPW, who had a free hand with the architecture of this remarkable specimen of eastern religiosity. They are nothing, you may be sure, to the gigantic idols in the side out of the reach of the sacrilegious camera. To the right is a tropical thatched hut. The thatched roof is really that nice ribbed paper that comes round bottles, a priceless boon to these games. All that comes into the house is saved for us. The owner of the hut lounges outside the door. He is a dismounted cavalry courseman and he owns one cow. His fence, I may note, belonged to a little wooden farm we bought in Switzerland. Its human inhabitants are scattered, its beasts follow a precarious living as wild guinea pigs on the islands to the south. Your attention is particularly directed at the trees about and behind the temple, which thicken to a forest on the further island to the right. These trees we make of twigs taken from trees and bushes in the garden and stuck into holes in our boards. Formerly we lived in a house with a little wood close by and our forests were wonderful. Now we are restricted to our garden and we could get nothing for this set out but jasmine and pear. Both have wilted a little and are not nearly such spirited trees as you can make out of fir trees, for instance. It is for these woods chiefly that we have our planks perforated with little holes. No tin trees can ever be so plausible and various and jolly as these. With a good garden to draw upon one can make terrific somber woods and then lie down and look through them at lonely horsemen or wandering beasts. That further island on the right is a less settled country than the island of the temple. Camels, you note, run wild there. There is a sort of dwarf elephant similar to the now extinct kind of which one finds skeletons in Malta. Pigs, a red parrot, and other such creatures of lead and wood. The pear trees are fine. It is those which have attracted white settlers, I suppose they are, whose thatched huts are to be seen both upon the beach and inland. By the huts on the beach lie a number of pear tree logs, but a rate of negroid savages from an adjacent island to the left is in progress. The only settler is the man in a clearly visible rifleman's uniform running inland for help. Beyond, peeping out among the trees, are the supports he seeks. These same negroid savages are as bold as they are ferocious. They cross arms of the sea and their rude canoes made simply of a strip of cardboard. Their own island, the one to the south left, is a rocky wilderness containing caves. Their chief food is the wild goat, but in pursuit of these creatures you will also sometimes find the brown bear. Who sits? He is small but perceptible to the careful student in the mouth of his cave. Here, too, you will distinguish small guinea pig-like creatures of wood. In happier days the inhabitants of that Swiss farm. Sunk and rocks off this island are indicated by a white foam which takes the form of letters and you will also note a whirlpool between the two islands to the right. Finally comes the island nearest to the reader on the left. This also is wild and rocky, inhabited not by negroid blacks, but by Indians, intense, made by FRW out of ordinary brown paper and adorned with chalk totems of a rude and characteristic kind, pour forth their fierce and well-armed inhabitants at the intimation of an invader. The rocks on this island, let me remark, have great mineral wealth. Among them are to be found not only sheets and veins of silver paper, but great nuggets of metal, obtained by the melting down hopelessly broken soldiers in an iron spoon. Note, too, the peculiar and romantic shell beach of this country. It is an island of exceptional interest to the geologist and scientific explorer. The Indians, you observe, have domesticated one leadon and one wooden cow. This is how the game would be set out. Then we build ships and explore these islands, but in these pictures are represented as already arriving. The ships are built out of our wooden bricks on flat keels made of two wooden pieces of nine by four and a half inches, which are very convenient to push about over the floor. Captain GPW is steaming into the bay between the eastern and western islands. He carries heavy guns. His ship bristles with an extremely aggressive soldiery, who appear to be blazing away for the mere love of the thing. I suspect him of imperialist intentions. Captain FRW is apparently at anchor between his northern and southern islands. His ship is of a slightly more pacific type. I note on his deck a lady and a gentleman of German origin. With a bag. Two of our all too rare civilians. No doubt the bag contains samples and a small conversation dictionary in the Nigroid dialects. I think FRW may turn out to be a liberal. Perhaps he will sail on and rescue the raided huts. Perhaps he will land and build a jetty and begin mining among the rocks to fill his hold with silver. Perhaps the natives will kill and eat the gentleman with the bag. All that is for Captain FRW to decide. You see how the game goes on. We land and alter things and build and rearrange and hoist paper flags on pins and subjugate populations and confer all the blessings of civilization upon these lands. We keep them going for days. At last as we begin to tire of them comes the scrubbing brush and we must burn our trees and dismantle our islands and put our soldiers in the little nests of drawers and stand the island boards up against the wall and put everything away. Then perhaps after a few days we begin upon some other such game just as we feel disposed. But it is never quite the same game, never. Another time it may be wildernesses, for example, and the boards are hills and never a drop of water is to be found except for the lakes and rivers we may mark out in chalk. But after one example others are easy and next I will tell you Section 3 of the Building of Cities We always build twin cities like London and Westminster or Budapest because two of us always want both of them to be mayors and municipal councils and it makes for local freedom and happiness to arrange it so. But when steam railways or street railways are involved we have our rails in common and we have an excellent law that rails must be laid down and switches kept open in such a manner that anyone feeling so disposed may send a through train from their own station back to their own station again without needless negotiation or the personal invasion of anyone else's administrative area. It is an undesirable thing to have other people bulging over one's houses in extreme cases knocking down and even treading on one's citizens it leads at times to explanations that are afterwards regretted. We always have twin cities or at the utmost stage of coalescence a city with two wards red end and blue end we mark the boundaries very carefully and our citizens have so much local patriotism Mr. Chesterton will learn that they stray but rarely over that thin little streak of white that bounds their municipal allegiance sometimes we have an election for mayor it is like a census but very abusive and red always wins only citizens with two legs and at least one arm and capable of standing up may vote and voters may poll on horseback Boy scouts and women and children may vote though there is a vigorous agitation to remove these disabilities Zulus and foreign looking persons such as East Indian cavalry and American Indians are also disfranchised so are riderless horses and camels but the elephant has never attempted to vote on any occasion and does not seem to desire the privilege it influences public opinion quite sufficiently as it is and it is a very important issue we have set out and I have photographed one of our cities to illustrate more clearly the amusement of the game red end is to the reader's right and includes most of the hill on which the town stands a shady zoological garden the town hall a railway tunnel through the hill a museum a way in the extreme right hand corner a church blue end has the railway station four or five shops several homes a hotel and a farmhouse close to the railway station the boundary drawn by me as overlord who also made the hills and tunnels and appointed the trees to grow runs irregularly between the two shops nearest the cathedral over the shoulder in front of the town hall and between the farm and the rifle range the nature of the hills I have already explained and this time we have had no lakes or ornamental water these are very easily made out of a piece of glass the glass lid of a box, for example laid upon silver paper such water becomes very readily populated by those celluloid seals and swans and ducks that are now so common paper fish appear below the surface and may be peered at by the curious but on this occasion we have nothing of the kind nor have we made use of a green colored tablecloth we sometimes use to drape our hills of course a large part of the fun of this game lies in the witty incorporation of all sorts of extraneous objects but the incorporation must be witty or you may soon convert the whole thing into an incoherent muddle of half good ideas I have taken two photographs one to the right and one to the left of this agreeable place I may perhaps adopt a kind of guidebook style in reviewing its principal features I begin at the railway station I have made a rather nearer and larger photograph of the railway station which presents a diversified and entertaining scene to the incoming visitor porters out of a box of porters career here and there with a truck some light baggage quite a number of our all too rare civilians parade the platform to gentlemen a lady and a small but evil looking child are particularly noticeable and there is a wooden sailor with jointed legs in a state of intoxication as reprehensible as it is nowadays happily rare two virtuous dogs regard his abandon with quiet scorn the seat on which he sprawls as a broken piece of some toy whose nature I have long forgotten the station clock is a similar fragment and so is the metallic pillar which bears the name of the station so many toys we find only become serviceable with a little smashing there is an allegory in this as Hawthorne used to write in his diary what is he doing the great god Pan down in the reeds by the river the fences at the ends of the platforms are pieces of wood belonging to the game of Matador that's splendid and very educational construction game hailing I believe from Hungary there is also I regret to say a blatant advertisement of jabs hair color showing the hair in the photograph the hair does not come out very plainly this is by GPW who seems marked out by destiny to be the advertisement writer of the next generation he spends much of his scanty leisure inventing and drawing advertisements of imaginary commodities oblivious to many happy beautiful and noble things in life he goes about studying and imitating the literature of the billboards he and his brother write newspapers almost entirely devoted to these annoying appeals you will note too in the middle of the railway tunnel urging the existence of Jinx soap upon the passing traveller the oblong object on the placard represents no doubt a cake of this offensive and aggressive commodity the zoological garden flaunts a placard zoo two cents pay and the grocer's picture of a cabbage with get them is not to be ignored FRW is more like London County Council in this respect and prefers bare walls returning from the station as the guide books say and giving one more glance at the passengers who are waiting for the privilege of going round the circle in open cars and returning in a prostrated condition to the station again and observing what admirable platforms are made by our nine by four and a half pieces we pass out to the left of the village street a motor omnibus a one horse hospital cart in less progressive days stands waiting for passengers and on our way to the cherry tree inn we remark two nurses one in charge of a child with a plasticine head the landlord of the inn is a small grotesque figure of plaster his sign is fastened on by a pen no doubt the refreshments supplied here are a considerable reputation to judge by the alacrity with which a number of riflemen move towards the door the inn, by the way, like the station and some private houses is roofed with stiff paper these stiff paper roofs are one of our greatest inventions after the game is over we put these roofs inside one another and stick them into the bookshelves the roof one folds and puts away will live to roof proceeding on our way past the cherry tree and resisting cozy invitation of its portals we come to the shopping-quarter of the town the stock in windows is made by hand out of plasticine we note the meat and hams of Mr. Wadi the cabbages and carrots of Todd and brothers the general activities of the Jocal Company shopman it is de regueur they should wear white helmets in the street boyscouts go to and fro a wagon clatters by most of the adult population is about its business and a red-coated band plays along the roadway contrast this animated scene with the mysteries of sea and forest rock and whirlpool in our previous game further on is the big church or cathedral it is built in an extremely debased it reminds us most of a church we once surveyed during a brief visit to Rotterdam on our way up the Rhine a solitary boy scout mindful of the views of Lord Haldane enters its high portal passing the cathedral we continue to the museum this museum is no empty boast it contains mineral specimens, shells such great shells as were found on the beaches of our previous game the titanic skulls of extinct rabbits and cats and other such wonders the slender curious may lie down on the floor and peep in at the windows we now, says the guidebook retrace our steps to the shops and then turning to the left ascend under the trees up the terraced hill on which stands the town hall this magnificent building is surmounted by a colossal statue of the chamois the work of a Wengen artist it is in two stories with a battle-mended roof and a crypt entrance to right of steps used for the incarceration of offenders it is occupied by the town guard who wear beef-eater costumes of ancient origin note the red parrot perched on the battlements it lives tame in the zoological gardens and is of the same species as one we formally observed in our archipelago note, too, the brisk cat and dog encounter below steps descend in wide flights down the hillside into blue-end the two Couchant lions on either side of the steps are in plasticine and were executed by that versatile artist who is also mayor of red-end GPW he is present our photographer has hit upon a happy moment in the history of this town and a conversation of the two mayors is going on upon the terrace before the palace FRW, mayor of blue-end stands on the steps in the costume of an admiral GPW is on horseback his habits are equestrian on the terrace the town guard parades in their honour and up the hill a number of musicians a little hidden by trees ride on grey horses towards them passing in front of the town hall and turning to the right we approach the zoological gardens here we pass two of our civilians a gentleman in black a lady and a large boy scout presumably their son we enter the gardens which are protected by a bearded janitor and remark it wants a band of three performing dogs who are, as the guide-book would say, discourseing sweet music in neither ward of the city does there seem to be the slightest restraint upon the use of musical instruments it is no place for neurotic people the gardens contain the inevitable elephants, camels which we breed and which are therefore inconsiderable numbers a sitting bear brought from last game's caves goats from the same region tamed and now running loose in the gardens dwarf elephants wooden nondescripts and other rare creatures the keepers wear a uniform not unlike that of railway guards and porters we wander through the gardens return to send the hill by the school of musketry where soldiers are to be seen shooting at the butts pass through the paddock of the old farm and so return to the railway station extremely gratified by all we have seen and almost equally divided in our minds between the merits and attractiveness of either ward a clockwork train comes clattering into the station we take our places somebody hoots or whistles for the engine which can't the signal is knocked over in the excitement of the moment the train starts and we wave a long regretful farewell to the salubrious cheerfulness of shammy city you see now how we set out and the spirit in which we set out our towns it demands but the slightest exercise of the imagination to devise a hundred editions and variations of the scheme you can make picture galleries great fun for small boys who can draw you can make factories you can plan out flower gardens which appeals very strongly to intelligent little girls your town hall may become a fortified castle or you may put the whole town on boards and make a Venice of it with ships and boats upon its canals and bridges across them we used to have some very serviceable ships of cardboard with flat bottoms and then we used to have a harbor and the ships used to sail away to distant rooms and even into the garden and return with the most remarkable cargoes loads of nasturtium stem logs for example made of gloves then made of glove fingers and several toy cranes I suppose we could find most of these again if we hunted for them once with this game fresh in our minds we went to see the docks which struck us as just our old harbor game magnified I say daddy said one of us in a quiet corner wistfully as one who speaks knowingly against the probabilities of the case couldn't we play just for a little with these sacks until somebody comes of course the setting out of the city is half the game then you devise incidents as I wanted to photograph the particular set out for the purpose of illustrating this account I took a larger share in the arrangement than I usually do it was necessary to get everything into the picture to ensure a light background to grow up some of the trees prevent too much overlapping and things like that when the photographing was over matters became more normal I left the school room and when I returned I found that the group of riflemen which had been converging on the public house had been sharply recalled to duty and were trotting in a disciplined cheerless way towards the railway station the elephant had escaped from the zoo into the blue ward and was being marched along by a military patrol the originally scattered Boy Scouts were being paraded GPW had demolished the shop of the Joe Kill Company and was building a red end station near the bend the stock of the Joe Kill Company had passed into the hands of the adjacent storekeepers then the town hall ceremonies came to an end and the guard marched off then GPW demolished the rifle range and ran a small branch of the urban railway uphill to the town hall door and on into the zoological gardens this was only the beginning of a period of enterprise in transit a small railway boom a number of halts of simple construction sprang up there was much making of railway tickets of a size that enabled passengers to stick their heads through the middle and wear them as a Mexican does his blanket then a battery of artillery turned up in the high street and there was talk of fortifications suppose wild Indians were to turn up across the plains to the left and attack the town fate still has toy drawers untouched so things will go on till putting away night on Friday then we shall pick up the roofs and shove them away among the books return the clockwork engines very carefully to their boxes for engines are fragile things stow the soldiers and civilians and animals in their nest of drawers burn the trees again this time they are sweet bay and all the joys and sorrows and rivalries and successes of blue end and red end will pass and follow Carthage and Nineveh the empire of Aztec and Roman the arts of Etruria and the palaces of Crete and the plantings and contrivings of innumerable myriads of children into the limbo of games exhausted it may be leaving some profit in thoughts widened in strengthened apprehensions it may be leaving nothing but a memory that dies section four funiculars, marble towers castles and war games but very little of war games I have now given two general types of floor game but these are only just two samples of delightful and imagination stirring variations that can be contrived out of the toys I have described I will now glance rather more shortly at some other very good uses of the floor the boards, the bricks, the soldiers and the railway system that pentagram for exercising the evil spirit of dullness from the lives of little boys and girls and first the kind of lark we call funiculars there are times when islands see somehow to dazzle and towns and cities are too orderly and uneventful and cramped for us and we want something something to whiz then we say let us make a funicular let us make a funicular more than we have ever done let us make one to reach up to the table we dispute whether it isn't the day we are after the bare name is refreshing it takes us back to that unforgettable time when we all went to Wengen winding in and out and up and up the mountainside from slush to such snow and sunlight as we had never seen before and we make a mountain railway so far we have never got it up to the table but some day we will then we will have a station and another station on the floor with shunts and sightings to each the peculiar joy of the mountain railway is that if it is properly made a loaded car not a toy engine it is too rough a game for delicate respectable engines will career from top to bottom of the system and go this way and that as your cunningly arranged switches determine and afterwards and this is a wonderful creative discovery you can send it back by electric what is electric you may well ask electrics were invented almost by accident by one of us to whom also the name is due it came out of an accident to a toy engine a toy engine that seemed done for and that was yet full of life you know perhaps what a toy engine is like it has the general appearance of a railway engine funnels, buffers, cab and so forth all these are very elegant things no doubt but they do not make for lightness they do not facilitate hill climbing now sometimes an engine gets its clockwork out of order and then it is over and done for but sometimes it is merely the outer semblance that is injured the funnel bent the body twisted you remove the things and you have bare clockwork on wheels an apparatus of almost malignant energy soul without body a kind of metallic rage this it was that our junior member instantly knew for electric and love from the moment of its stripping I have by the way known a very serviceable little road electric made out of a clockwork mouse well when we have got chairs and boxes and bricks and graded our lines skillfully and well easing the descent and being very careful of the joining at the bends for fear that the descending trucks and cars will jump the rails we send down first an empty truck then trucks loaded with bricks and led soldiers and then the electric and then afterwards the sturdy electric shoves up the trucks again to the top with a kind of savagery of purpose 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 diverted 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 yet 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 and 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 toy makers so much I think I have done if one parent or one uncle buys the wiser for me I shall not altogether have lived in vain end of book