“Let us pull out the writing drawer and make a castle.”
So they pulled the drawer out and put it on the floor. Please do
not try to do this if your father has a bureau, because it leads to
trouble. It was only because this one was broken that they were able to
do it.
Then they began to build. They had the two boxes of bricks—the wooden
bricks with the pillars and the coloured glass windows, and the
rational bricks which are made of clay like tiles, and their father
called them the All-Wool bricks, which seems silly, only of course
grown-up people always talk sense. When all the bricks were used up
they got the pretty picture blocks that kind Uncle Thomas gave them,
and they built with these; but one box of blocks does not go far.
Picture blocks are only good for building, except just at first. When
you have made the pictures a few times you know exactly how they go,
and then what’s the good? This is a fault which belongs to many very
expensive toys. These blocks had six pictures—Windsor Castle with the
Royal Standard hoisted; ducks in a pond, with a very handsome green and
blue drake; Rebecca at the well; a snowball fight—but none of the boys
knew how to chuck a snowball; the Harvest Home; and the Death of Nelson.
These did not go far, as I said. There are six times as few blocks as
there are pictures, because every block has six sides. If you don’t
understand this it shows they don’t teach arithmetic at your school, or
else that you don’t do your home lessons.
But the best of a library is the books. Rosamund and Fabian made up
with books. They got Shakespeare in fourteen volumes, and Rollin’s
“Ancient History,” and Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” and “The Beauties
of Literature” in fifty-six fat little volumes, and they built not only
a castle, but a town—and a big town—that presently towered high above
them on the top of the bureau.
“It’s almost big enough to get into,” said Fabian, “if we had
some steps.” So they made steps with the “British Essayists,” the
“Spectator,” and the “Rambler,” and the “Observer,” and the “Tatler”;
and when the steps were done they walked up them.
You may think that they could not have walked up these steps and
into a town they had built themselves, but I assure you people have
often done it, and anyway this is a true story. They had made a
lovely gateway with two fat volumes of Macaulay and Milton’s poetical
works on top, and as they went through it they felt all the feelings
which people have to feel when they are tourists and see really fine
architecture. (Architecture means buildings, but it is a grander word,
as you see.)
Rosamund and Fabian simply walked up the steps into the town they
had built. Whether they got larger or the town got smaller, I do not
pretend to say. When they had gone under the great gateway they found
that they were in a street which they could not remember building. But
they were not disagreeable about it, and they said it was a very nice
street all the same.
There was a large square in the middle of the town, with seats, and
there they sat down, in the town they had made, and wondered how they
could have been so clever as to build it. Then they went to the walls
of the town—high, strong walls built of the Encyclopedia and the
Biographical Dictionary—and far away over the brown plain of the carpet
they saw a great thing like a square mountain. It was very shiny. And
as they looked at it a great slice of it pushed itself out, and Fabian
saw the brass handles shine, and he said:
“Why, Rom, that’s the bureau.”
“It’s larger than I want it to be,” said Rosamund, who was a little
frightened. And indeed it did seem to be an extra size, for it was
higher than the town.
The drawer of the great mountain bureau opened slowly, and the children
could see something moving inside; then they saw the glass lid of one
of the boxes go slowly up till it stood on end and looked like one side
of the Crystal Palace, it was so large—and inside the box they saw
something moving. The shavings and tissue-paper and the cotton-wool
heaved and tossed like a sea when it is rough and you wish you had not
come for a sail. And then from among the heaving whiteness came out a
blue soldier, and another and another. They let themselves down from
the drawer with ropes of shavings, and when they were all out there
were fifty of them—foot soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets, as
well as a thin captain on a horse and a sergeant and a drummer.
The drummer beat his drum and the whole company formed fours and
marched straight for the town. They seemed to be quite full-size
soldiers—indeed, _extra_ large.
The children were very frightened. They left the walls and ran up and
down the streets of the town trying to find a place to hide.
“Oh, there’s our very own house,” cried Rosamund at last; “we shall be
safe there.” She was surprised as well as pleased to find their own
house inside the town they had built.
So they ran in, and into the library, and there was the bureau and the
castle they had built, and it was all small and quite the proper size.
But when they looked out of the window it was not their own street, but
the one they had built; they could see two volumes of the “Beauties of
Literature” and the head of Rebecca in the house opposite, and down the
street was the Mausoleum they had built after the pattern given in the
red and yellow book that goes with the All-Wool bricks. It was all very
confusing.
Suddenly, as they stood looking out of the windows, they heard a
shouting, and there were the blue soldiers coming along the street by
twos, and when the Captain got opposite their house he called out—
“Fabian! Rosamund! come down!”
And they had to, for they were very much frightened.