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Spillikins is out of fashion, superseded by what are no doubt better and more amusing games. It had its period of popularity in the distant days when I was a small boy. I remember it as a drawing-room game, produced by an aunt who hoped it would keep me quiet. Hers was a fine set, delicately carved in ivory and stored in the drawer of a cabinet with a bowed front. In the nursery and schoolroom we had other sets, of commoner material and roughly carved, with which we had exciting games. With the drawing-room set only the legitimate game might be played.

Now, I dare say, boys and girls do not know what spillikins are or how we played with them, and my equals in age must make an effort of memory to recall the game. Yet it is worth remembering if only for the sake of the toys with which it was played. The ivory, or bone, was cut into all sorts of shapes. Here, episcopal and reverend, was a pastoral staff. Here was a duellist’s rapier. Beside them was a carpenter’s saw, or a cavalry sabre, or a smith’s tongs, a housewife’s darning-needle, a monarch’s sceptre, a cripple’s crutch, a woodman’s axe, the lancet of a surgeon perhaps, a walking-stick with a crooked handle, a reaper’s sickle, and many things of which I did not know the names, about whose uses I could only guess. All of these were of the same size, or nearly the same size, the darning-needle as big as the sabre or the pastoral staff. This, I remember, seemed to me then to spoil the realism of the imagery. Now I am inclined to think that a deeper realism was achieved. Perhaps the sickle is as important as the rapier and the hand-saw as great as the sceptre in the eyes of angels and others who dwell beyond our sphere. I am inclined now to think it possible that the first deviser of the game meant to teach a great truth when he ordained that the spillikins should all be flung down in a single disorderly heap. It is thus that life treats those who use the tools. Knight and churl—but there are no churls nowadays. If there were we should probably knight them. Monarchs and woodmen have much the same sensations when they are hungry. Bishops and harvest reapers are alike liable to toothache. To all comes the same inevitable end.

The makers of spillikins aimed at no unity and had no philosophy in their work, for this trite levelling and deliberate confusion can scarcely be called philosophy. They worked in fashioning the toys as fancy and mood impelled them. “I will carve a sceptre,” said the craftsman, with his ivory in front of him and his knife in his hand. “A sceptre; for a king is august, and I find a flavour in his pomp.” Or, “I will make a darning-needle, for my toe has pushed a hole in my sock.” At the moment it was that hole, or another at his heel, that held his thoughts, and he cared little about Courts and royalties. Or, again, an hour later, so swiftly do moods change: “I am a fighter and must make a sword.” Or, “After all, it is upon the harvest that all our civilization is built up. A sickle is the fittest subject for my skill.”

I am no artist. I am not even a skilled craftsman. I work in common stuff, not the delicate ivory of beautiful, or precious, prose. I claim kinship with the makers of spillikins only in this, that I have worked as fancy directed, writing in various moods, in different places, and at different times. The results, the toys of my fashioning, have been flung down without order in a heap, as the spillikins were. I shall count myself fortunate if anyone finds it amusing to pick out one or two of the things that I have made. I shall not be much aggrieved—knowing that the judgment is quite just, I cannot be aggrieved—if my spillikins are condemned for what they are, little toys without purpose or meaning, not even well carved. That, for the most part, is what the spillikins of my childhood were, so I claim, though I claim nothing else, a certain fitness for the title of my book.

G. A. B.

April 1926