concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and several mines

of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of survivors

from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently

invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the

uncultivated wildness of this region further by trees of privet-

twigs from the garden hedge and box from the garden borders. By

these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro,

bridging gaps in the oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic

hills-one tunnel was three volumes long-defended as occasion

required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at

last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on the

cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.

My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and

developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion

and now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or

twelve. I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the

retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time. I

played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods;

through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school

and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect Isee them all

not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened andconfused

together. A clockwork railway, I seem toremember, came and went;

one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that,being keeled,

would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a

detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me

by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt,

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