incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and charm of

the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and

steps and windows through which one peeped into their intricacies,

and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them,

and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the

hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun

emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And

there was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of

nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender

from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-

boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread

and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the

beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places

that were dismal swamps. And there were battles on the way.

That great road is still clear in mymemory. I was given, I forget

by what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead-

I have neverseen such soldiers since-and for these my father

helped me to make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a

hitherto desolate country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of

an ancient trunk. Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land.

(Alas! they died, nodoubt through contact with civilisation-one my

mother trod on-and their land became a wilderness again and was

ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.)

And out towards the coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable

thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus

brandishing spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks

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