owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have

not forgotten the chagrins anddreams of childhood. He was a

prosperous west of England builder; including my father he had three

nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made

by an out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the

toyshop, youunderstand, but areally adequate quantity of bricks

made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by

two and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks to

correspond. There were hundreds of them, many hundreds. I could

build six towers as high asmyself with them, and there seemed quite

enough for every engineering project I could undertake. I could

build whole towns with streets and houses and churches and citadels;

I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over

crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of

whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push over the

high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplined

population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and

all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors

and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.

Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who

write about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common

theme for essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and

cutting out of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink

and glory of the performance and the final conflagration. I had

such a theatre once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from

it; my bricks and soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an

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