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 toyshops, 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; they 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,
18 x 9, 9 x 9, and 9 x 4-1/2. 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.