Floor Games | Page 8

to be mayors
and municipal councils, and it makes for local freedom and happiness
to arrange it so; but when steam railways or street railways are involved
we have our rails in common, and we have an excellent law that rails
must be laid down and switches kept open in such a manner that
anyone feeling so disposed may send a through train from their own
station back to their own station again without needless negotiation or
the personal invasion of anybody else's administrative area. It is an
undesirable thing to have other people bulging over one's houses,
standing in one's open spaces, and, in extreme cases, knocking down
and even treading on one's citizens. It leads at times to explanations
that are afterwards regretted.
We always have twin cities, or at the utmost stage of coalescence a city
with two wards, Red End and Blue End; we mark the boundaries very
carefully, and our citizens have so much local patriotism (Mr.
Chesterton will learn with pleasure) that they stray but rarely over that
thin little streak of white that bounds their municipal allegiance.
Sometimes we have an election for mayor; it is like a census but very
abusive, and Red always wins. Only citizens with two legs and at least
one arm and capable of standing up may vote, and voters may poll on
horseback; boy scouts and women and children do not vote, though
there is a vigorous agitation to remove these disabilities. Zulus and
foreign- looking persons, such as East Indian cavalry and American
Indians, are also disfranchised. So are riderless horses and camels; but
the elephant has never attempted to vote on any occasion, and does not
seem to desire the privilege. It influences public opinion quite
sufficiently as it is by nodding its head.
We have set out and I have photographed one of our cities to illustrate
more clearly the amusement of the game. Red End is to the reader's
right, and includes most of the hill on which the town stands, a shady
zoological garden, the town hall, a railway tunnel through the hill, a
museum (away in the extreme right-hand corner), a church, a rifle
range, and a shop. Blue End has the railway station, four or five shops,

several homes, a hotel, and a farm-house, close to the railway station.
The boundary drawn by me as overlord (who also made the hills and
tunnels and appointed the trees to grow) runs irregularly between the
two shops nearest the cathedral, over the shoulder in front of the town
hall, and between the farm and the rifle range.
The nature of the hills I have already explained, and this time we have
had no lakes or ornamental water. These are very easily made out of a
piece of glass--the glass lid of a box for example--laid upon silver
paper. Such water becomes very readily populated by those celluloid
seals and swans and ducks that are now so common. Paper fish appear
below the surface and may be peered at by the curious. But on this
occasion we have nothing of the kind, nor have we made use of a
green- colored tablecloth we sometimes use to drape our hills. Of
course, a large part of the fun of this game lies in the witty
incorporation of all sorts of extraneous objects. But the incorporation
must be witty, or you may soon convert the whole thing into an
incoherent muddle of half- good ideas.
I have taken two photographs, one to the right and one to the left of this
agreeable place. I may perhaps adopt a kind of guide-book style in
reviewing its principal features: I begin at the railway station. I have
made a rather nearer and larger photograph of the railway station,
which presents a diversified and entertaining scene to the incoming
visitor. Porters (out of a box of porters) career here and there with the
trucks and light baggage. Quite a number of our all-too-rare civilians
parade the platform: two gentlemen, a lady, and a small but
evil-looking child are particularly noticeable; and there is a wooden
sailor with jointed legs, in a state of intoxication as reprehensible as it
is nowadays happily rare. Two virtuous dogs regard his abandon with
quiet scorn. The seat on which he sprawls is a broken piece of some toy
whose nature I have long forgotten, the station clock is a similar
fragment, and so is the metallic pillar which bears the name of the
station. So many toys, we find, only become serviceable with a little
smashing. There is an allegory in this--as Hawthorne used to write in
his diary.
("What is he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the
river?")
The fences at the ends of the platforms are