Well, when we have got chairs and boxes and bricks, and graded our line
skilfully 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 lead soldiers, and then the 'lectric; and then
afterwards the sturdy 'lectric shoves up the trucks again to the top,
with a kind of savagery of purpose and a whizz 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 averted; 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: it 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 in 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
toymakers. So much, I think, I have done. If one parent or one uncle