enough; even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say, "This is
a house," even then there are not enough. We see rich people, rich
people out of motor cars, rich people beyond the dreams of avarice,
going into toyshops and buying these skimpy, sickly, ridiculous pseudo-
boxes of bricklets, because they do not know what to ask for, and the
toyshops are just the merciless mercenary enemies of youth and happiness
--so far, that is, as bricks are concerned. Their unfortunate under-
parented offspring mess about with these gifts, and don't make very much
of them, and put them away; and you see their consequences in after life
in the weakly-conceived villas and silly suburbs that people have built
all round big cities. Such poor under-nourished nurseries must needs
fall back upon the Encyclopedia Britannica, and even that is becoming
flexible on India paper! But our box of bricks almost satisfies. With
our box of bricks we can scheme and build, all three of us, for the best
part of the hour, and still have more bricks in the box.

So much now for the bricks. I will tell later how we use cartridge paper
and cardboard and other things to help in our and of the decorative make
of plasticine. Of course, it goes without saying that we despise those
foolish, expensive, made-up wooden and pasteboard castles that are sold
in shops--playing with them is like playing with somebody else's dead
game in a state of rigor mortis. Let me now say a little about toy
soldiers and the world to which they belong. Toy soldiers used to be
flat, small creatures in my own boyhood, in comparison with the
magnificent beings one can buy to-day. There has been an enormous
improvement in our national physique in this respect. Now they stand
nearly two inches high and look you broadly in the face, and they have
the movable arms and alert intelligence of scientifically exercised men.
You get five of them mounted or nine afoot in a box for a small price.
We three like those of British manufacture best; other makes are of