THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

hills-one tu

required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at

last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on the

cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.

My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and

developed from small begi

and now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or

twelve. I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the

retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time. I

played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods;

through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school

and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect I see them all

not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused

together. A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went;

one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled,

would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a

detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me

by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt,

that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public

buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and

therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass

ca

I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my

memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots

that went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they

stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow

growth of whole days of civilised development. I still remember the

hatred and disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given

warnings. Did I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend,

plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling

them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and

swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of the Imperial

Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into

the fire.

Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say,

"you ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until

you've sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do

it I will."

And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and

swiping strokes of house-fla

That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear

lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore spring-

sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world,

with dull bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that

were very destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial

Road. She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me

for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity!

fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed to

understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which

she came to me. Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except the

bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a

Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a

wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know whether a

thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with ca

and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of

God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of

ark rather elaborately done.

Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of

the pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen.

You made your beasts-which were all the ark lot really,

provisionally conceived as pigs-go up elaborate approaches to a

central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a

time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-

litter over some steep steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah)

strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks

along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly

Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army

sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.

My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore

bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors-my

mother disliked boots in the house-and he would sit down on my

little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable

understanding and sympathy.

It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of

my ideas. "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable

for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled

paper that is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you

see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?-won't do for your

cattle ranch." And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a

special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting

expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the

city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and

his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.

And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the

inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood

except those of Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for

himself and me from the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and

Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war

and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end;

Stanley and Livingstone, lives of Wellington, Napoleon and

Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived