In the course of my book-hunting, I had fallen in with two old-fashioned military treatises, part of the small library of a retired officer lately deceased, of which the one entitled the "Military Medley," discussed the whole art of marshalling troops, and contained numerous plans, neatly coloured, of battalions drawn up in all possible forms, to meet all possible exigencies; while the other, which also abounded in prints, treated of the noble science of fortification according to the system of Vauban. I poured over both works with much perseverance; and, regarding them as admirable toy-books, set myself to construct, on a very small scale, some of the toys with which they specially dealt. The sea-shore in the immediate neighbourhood of the town appeared to my inexperienced eye an excellent field for the carrying on of a campaign. The sea-sand I found quite coherent enough, when still moistened by the waters of the receding tide, to stand up in the form of towers and bastions, and long lines of rampart; and there was one of the commonest of the Littorinidæ--_Littorina litoralis_, that in one of its varieties is of a rich yellow colour, and in another of a bluish-green tint--which supplied me with soldiers enough to execute all the evolutions figured and described in the "Medley." The warmly-hued yellow shells represented Britons in their scarlet--the more dingy ones, the French in their uniforms of dirty blue; well-selected specimens of _Purpura lapillus_, just tipped on their backs with a speck of paint, blue or red, from my box, made capital dragoons; while a few dozens of the slender pyramidal shells of _Turritella communis_ formed complete parks of artillery. With such unlimited stores of the _matériel_ of war at my command, I was enabled, more fortunate than Uncle Toby of old, to fight battles and conduct retreats, assault and defend, build up fortifications, and then batter them down again, at no expense at all; and the only drawback on such a vast amount of advantage that I could at first perceive consisted in the circumstance, that the shore was exceedingly open to observation, and that my new amusements, when surveyed at a little distance, did greatly resemble those of the very young children of the place, who used to repair to the same arenaceous banks and shingle-beds, to bake dirt-pies in the sand, or range lines of shells on little shelves of stone, imitative of the crockery cupboard at home. Not only my school-fellows, but also some of their parents, evidently arrived at the conclusion that the two sets of amusements--mine and those of the little children--were identical; for the elder folk said, that "in their time, poor Francie had been such another boy, and every one saw what he had come to;" while the younger, more energetic in their manifestations, and more intolerant of folly, have even paused in their games of marbles, or ceased spinning their tops, to hoot at me from a safe distance.