Page:Nine Unlikely Tales.djvu/261

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THE TOWN IN THE LIBRARY
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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