No philosophy is worth its salt unless it can make a boy forget that he has the toothache; and the philosophy which I am about to introduce has triumphantly survived that exacting ordeal. That Jack had the toothache everybody knew. The expression of his anguish resounded dismally through the neighbourhood; the evidence of it was visible in his swollen and distorted countenance. Poor Jack! All the standard cures—old-fashioned and new-fangled—had been tried in vain; all but one. It was that one that at last relieved the pain, and it is of that one that I now write. It happened that Jack was within a week of his birthday. His parents, who are busy people, might easily have overlooked that interesting circumstance had not Jack chanced to allude to it at every opportune and inopportune moment during the previous month or so. Indeed, to guard against accidents, Jack had enlivened the conversation at the breakfast-table morning by morning with really ingenious conjectures as to the presents by which his personal friends might conceivably accompany their congratulations. His 208expressions of disappointment in certain supposititious cases, and of unbounded delight in others, was quite affecting.

Now Jack’s father is afflicted by a wholesome dread of shopping. If a purchase must needs be made, Jack’s mother has to make it. But Jack’s mother labours under one severe disability. As Jack himself often tells her—and certainly he ought to know—she doesn’t understand boys. The difficulty is therefore surmounted on this wise. Jack’s mother visits the emporium; carefully avoids all those goods and chattels of which she has heard her son speak with such withering disdain; selects eight or ten of the articles that he has chanced to mention in tones of undisguised approval; orders these to be sent on approval at an hour at which Jack will be sure to be at school; and leaves to her husband the responsibility of making the final decision. Now this unwieldy parcel was still lying under the bed in the spare room on that fateful morning when Jack became smitten with toothache. Every other nostrum having failed, the mind of Jack’s mother strangely turned to the toys beneath the bed. A woman’s mind is an odd piece of mechanism, and works in strange ways. No doctor under the sun would dream of prescribing a box of tin soldiers as a remedy for toothache; yet the mind of Jack’s mother fastened upon that box of tin 209soldiers. It was just as cheap as some of the other remedies to which they had so desperately resorted; and it could not possibly be less efficacious. And there would still be plenty of toys to choose from for the birthday present. Out came the box of soldiers, and off went Jack in greatest glee. Half an hour later his mother found him in the back garden. He had dug a trench two inches deep, piling up the earth in protective heaps in front of it. All along the trench stood the little tin soldiers heroically defying the armies of the universe. And the toothache was ancient history!

Jack managed to get his little tin soldiers into a tiny two-inch trench; but, as a matter of serious fact, those diminutive warriors have occupied a really great place in the story of this little world. Bagehot somewhere draws a pathetic picture of crowds of potential authors who, having the time, the desire, and the ability to write, are yet unable for the life of them to think of anything to write about. Let one of these unfortunates bend his unconsecrated energies to the writing of a book on the influence of toys in the making of men. Only the other day an antiquarian, digging away in the neighbourhood of the Pyramids, came upon an old toy-chest. Here were dolls, and soldiers, and wooden animals, and, indeed, all the playthings that make up the stock-in-trade of a modern nursery. 210It is pleasant to think of those small Egyptians in the days of the Pharaohs amusing themselves with the selfsame toys that beguiled our own childhood. It is pleasant to think of the place of the toy-chest in the history of the world from that remote time down to our own.

But I must not be deflected into a discussion of the whole tremendous subject of toys. I must stick to these little tin soldiers. And these small metallic warriors cut a really brave figure in our history. Some of the happiest days in Robert Louis Stevenson’s happy life were the days that he spent as a boy in his grandfather’s manse at Colinton. ‘That was my golden age!’ he used to say. He never forgot the rickety old phaeton that drove into Edinburgh to fetch him; the lovely scenery on either side of the winding country road; or the excited welcome that always awaited him when he drove up to the manse door. But most vividly of all he remembered the box of tin soldiers; the marshalling of huge armies on the great mahogany table; the play of strategy; the furious combat; and the final glorious victory. The old gentleman sat back in his spacious arm-chair, cracking his nuts and sipping his wine, whilst his imaginative little grandson in his velvet suit controlled the movements of armies and the fates of empires. The love of those little tin soldiers never forsook him. Later on, at Davos, 211an exile from home, fighting bravely against that terrible malady that had marked him as its prey, it was to the little tin soldiers that he turned for comfort. ‘The tin soldiers most took his fancy,’ says Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, ‘and the war game was constantly improved and elaborated, until, from a few hours, a war took weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic monopolized half our thoughts. On the floor a map was roughly drawn in chalks of different colours, with mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, and roads in two colours. The mimic battalions marched and countermarched, changed by measured evolutions from column formation into line, with cavalry screens in front ............