Chapter III: Part 3

The wheelbarrow is just a little more difficult to make than these other toys, but not too great a task for a child with clever fingers. A section that is about one third of the entire length is measured and cut off the second small box, and thrown away. It is the remaining two-thirds of the box that is to make the wheelbarrow. The front, open edges of the box are now curved like the sides of a real wheelbarrow. Two narrow strips of the cover, or two small sticks are glued to the front of the wheelbarrow for handles, and two shorter lengths of cardboard or two very tiny sticks form the legs. Another cardboard circle cut the same size as those used for the cart wheels is inserted by means of a knife cut in the back of the barrow and helps it to trundle along.

The box-built cart and wheelbarrow will be found most useful in the spring. They can be loaded with little green apples, tiny brown pebbles that look like toy potatoes, corn kernels, or peas. They will be strong enough to last a whole season and help to carry fodder to the horse who lives in the box barn.

There is still more box fun. Ask mother for an empty cardboard starch box, the strong kind covered with blue paper, and see what a fine little toy garage it will make. Almost every child has a toy automobile given him for Christmas, but it is so apt to go steering away with its own gasoline, and losing itself somewhere in the house if a child has no special place in which to keep it.

Take the cover of the box and turn the box itself bottom side up. On one side, right in the center, draw a big square. The lower part of the square should come on the very outside edge of the box because this square is to be the garage door. The door should be made in two parts, so as to open very wide and admit the automobile when it comes steaming along in a great hurry. To make this double door, draw a perpendicular line that divides the square into two parts. Then, with a pair of sharp scissors cut right up this line to the top of the square. Next, cut along the top line to the right and left of the middle line. Folding back the two halves that have just been cut, out toward the outside of the box, makes two little doors and opens the front of the garage. Square windows can be cut in the sides of the box, as many as one wishes.

A number of empty thread boxes will make a splendid train of cars, strong enough to drag a whole family of china dolls or a load of live stock up and down the piazza or along the garden path. Cardboard circles cut from the covers of the thread boxes and of the same size as those used for the wheels of the toy cart make the car wheels. They are fastened on, either in similar fashion to the cart wheels by means of paper fasteners, or a bone collar button may be pushed through cart and wheel, helping the wheels to revolve more easily. One of the thread boxes has the cover glued on, and to the top is glued also one large wooden spool for the engine’s smoke stack, and a block for the engineer’s cab. These little box cars are coupled together by short lengths of braided cord. Holes are punched in the ends of the cars with an awl and the cord is pushed through and knotted at each end to hold it in place. A long piece of cord is fastened to the engine and is used to draw the cars by.

There is no end to the entertainment and fun to be had from a pile of empty boxes. Just get to work at a few of them your next free afternoon and find out how much they are able to help you in your play.

A RECIPE FOR A NOAH’S ARK

It isn’t a very difficult recipe to follow. All the stirring you need to do will be when you mix up some flour and a little water to make the paste. That is the first ingredient. Next in the recipe comes a pair of sharp scissors and a pencil. After that you must find some sheets of heavy paper, and the old animal picture books that you thought you could not enjoy any longer because the leaves were coming apart and the pictures were torn. Spread out all these things on the nursery table, and you will be ready to begin the Noah’s Ark.

The Ark itself is to be a big, strong envelope for holding all the wild animals, and this is how you must make it. One of the sheets of heavy paper should be folded in half. The folded edge forms the bottom of the envelope. Beginning with this folded edge, the outline of the Ark is drawn on the paper with your pencil. It is a simple outline to draw--a big boat with curved ends, and a sort of house resting on the top. Then, holding the folded edge tightly so that the paper will not slip, cut out the Ark. The ends of the Ark should be bound or glued, but the top is left open that the animals may be put in.

Windows and a door are cut in the Ark for the animals will want to look out as they sail away on their wonderful voyage, and the Ark may be painted bright red with green trimmings.

Next come the animals.

The pictures of the animals may be mounted on one of the remaining sheets of heavy paper, so they will be stiff enough to stand up alone. That is one way of making enough animals to fill the Ark, but there is another way that will take a little longer, but will prove ever so much more fun.

The loose pictures from the book of animals should be fastened to the table with thumb tacks, or tacked to a drawing board. A square of white tissue paper is then laid over each, and the outline of the animal’s body is traced with a soft pencil. When the tracing is finished, the tissue paper is carefully lifted off and laid with the plain side up on some stiff white cardboard. The outline is then retraced with the same soft pencil leaving a pattern of the animal on the cardboard. The animal is then cut out, and painted with the nursery water colors.

You will need to be very clever, indeed, to paint the animals so that they will look as if they were just fresh from the jungle. There must be a tawny lion colored with brown that has a great deal of yellow ocher mixed with it. The panther must be orange with big yellow spots, and large green eyes. The tiger’s eyes must have yellow mixed with the green paint and his coat is yellow with orange stripes. The bear is brown and the kangaroo is tan.

There should be two of each kind of animal. Now how shall you make them stand up and walk like real, live animals? Some very tiny bits of wood may be glued to their feet. That is one way of making the animals stand. Another way is to make a narrow ring of the same cardboard from which the animals were cut. The animals’ feet are then glued to this ring, and they will really stand.

A boy will be able to make more animals than he can count,--leopards, monkeys, zebras, elephants, as many as he can find patterns for in his toy picture books. And it will prove such fun to draw them and paint them that he will be kept busy for many rainy afternoons.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN UNIFORM

Every boy needs to be a soldier, once in a while. There are so many brave deeds to be done and so many cowardly things to fight, and so much dark to walk through courageously, and so many strange dogs and cats, and shy little girls to protect with all the gallantry of those old, old knights who lived in the story-book days. A soldier boy is never late for school, and he never, never forgets to do an errand. He goes to bed alone every evening at eight, even if the stairway is dark, and there is no light in the upstairs hall to chase away the ghosts. He never lies, and he is always cheerful. He knows that being brave and gallant and true is just as much a part of a soldier’s duty as marching, and drumming, and saluting Old Glory.

It isn’t easy to be a soldier though in a plain, everyday suit of clothes, made of homespun perhaps, and patched, and dingy brown in color. A real soldier suit cut and fitted the right size for a boy costs more money than there is in the boy’s tin bank. What is the boy going to do if he wants more than anything else to be a soldier and he hasn’t enough money to buy himself a suit?

Any boy will be able to make the soldier trappings shown in the picture, and when he puts on the cap, and the shield, pins the epaulets to his shoulders and sticks the play sword in his belt, he will be ready for the life of a little soldier. He can work or play cheerfully, and when it comes Saturday, or Washington’s Birthday, he will be the envy of all the other boys as he leads them in a fine parade, dressed in his gay, home-made soldier things.

Suppose we make the soldier’s cap first. The diagram marked Fig. 1, 2, 3, and 4, shows just how to do the construction. A bright red cap will be fine for the soldier, or a blue one just the color of the blue field in the flag. There is a kind of tough, half-heavy paper called book cover paper. One can order it from a stationer’s shop or a printing factory at a cent or two a sheet. Some sheets of this will make the boy’s own cap and enough for all the other soldiers in the regiment. A piece of paper that measures fourteen by twenty inches is the foundation for the soldier cap. Fold the two narrower edges together until they touch, and crease the paper through the center as shown in Fig. 1. Then with the paper still folded, make a second fold as shown by the line in Fig. 2. This line forms a guide line for the next two folds which make the point of the cap. Lay the papers, open, as in Fig. 1, on a table with the folded edge at the back; fold each half of the back edge down along the line made by the last folding. Then fold up and crease the lower open edges forming the rim of the cap. The rim should be glued down to make the cap firm and strong. A feather can be made by fringing strips of red or blue crépe paper and twisting them around a narrow strip of cardboard which is glued inside the rim of the cap. A turkey’s feather will do just as well, or a bunch of hen’s feathers, or a cockade made of red, white, and blue ribbons to decorate the cap.

A boy can find a splendid shield pattern in the back of the dictionary. Copy it, and enlarge it until it is the right size to cover a boy’s shirt bosom. Then draw it on heavy white cardboard, and cut it out. A good size for the shield will be eight by ten inches. When it is cut it can be decorated with stars and stripes with colored pencils or paints as shown in the picture. The stripes are drawn carefully with a ruler and filled in with color; one red and one white. The blue ground above the stripes is dotted with stars cut from gilt paper and pasted on. Two holes are punched in the sides of the shield, and a bit of cord is strung in by means of which the shield may be hung around a boy’s neck. It will make his heart beat faster and give him a whole lot of courage every time he looks down at its brave stars and stripes.

Now for the sword which looks like a formidable weapon in the picture, but is really not dangerous at all. Every boy knows how to roll a narrow piece of paper, and make a lamp lighter. The sword that is part of this home-made soldier suit is made in just the same way. Cut some narrow strips of the book cover paper and join them with glue until there is a long strip. Roll this strip of paper tightly, in lamp lighter fashion, until it is fifteen inches long. Then press it flat between heavy weights. Roll a second strip of paper for a length of six inches and glue it to the broad end of the sword as a handle. These swords are so delightfully easy to make that a boy will want to roll a dozen after he has made his first one, and he can arm himself with as many paper poniards as an Indian chief has arrows in his quiver.

The soldier’s epaulets are just five by two inch strips of the book cover paper cut to fit a boy’s shoulders and decorated with fringed red and blue tissue paper. They can be pinned to the soldier’s coat shoulders with safety pins and will make an ordinary play suit quite as military in appearance as any uniform.

When the boy soldier is dressed in this home-made uniform, which will be even more effective than any which is for sale in a toy shop, he will be ready for any adventure in addition to the brave prowess of everyday life. Perhaps he and the other boys will want to take one of mother’s old blankets and two or three clothes poles for a tent, and tramp as far as the woods for a day of real scouting. Every soldier has a knapsack for carrying provisions and this play soldier will need one, too. A large, flat box makes a fine knapsack. Inside can be packed a bundle of sandwiches, two or three apples, a doughnut or two, and a piece of pie or a big slice of pound cake. When the box is packed, tie it securely with a length of cord, and have one end of the cord for a strap by means of which the knapsack is hung across the soldier’s back. Roll a square of old blanket and tie to the top of the box just as a real soldier fastens his blanket to his knapsack, and the make-believe soldier in cap, epaulets, and shield can draw his sword and start off in search of any adventure.

JOINTED TOY ANIMALS. HOW TO MAKE THEM

They will really do “stunts,” these toys in the picture. The grasshopper will hop if you stand him up on a table and give him a chance. The turtle will crawl along much faster than an ordinary, live turtle. The crocodile will follow you so fast that you will surely be eaten by him unless you hurry. What fun it is going to be to play with these live toys, but first a child must make them, and as many more as he likes.

Clear a low table on which to work and find some heavy cardboard or thick water color paper from which to construct the animals. Bring also, a pair of strong scissors, a sheet of tracing paper, a soft lead pencil and the box of water color paints you found in your stocking last Christmas. These are all the tools and material necessary for making a barnful of animals. Ask mother for some porcelain collar buttons to fasten the animals’ legs to the bodies. The laundry man brings so many of these useless studs every week and a crop of them will be fine for jointing the animals. If one cannot find enough collar buttons, a box of tiny brass paper fasteners will serve very well instead.

Every boy knows how to draw a few animals, at least free hand. If he is clever enough to be able to do this just by watching the horses out in the street, or the tiger in the Zoo, or the kitten who sits in front of the nursery fire, washing her face, so much the better. He will not need any patterns. The child who finds difficulty in sketching an animal free hand will have to trace his patterns from a book, or a toy animal. Often one of the nursery toy animals may be laid flat on the cardboard and its outline drawn and cut. Noah’s Ark animals, if they are large, make excellent patterns for a child to copy. If one has no toys of the right size, the tracing paper may be laid over the picture of an animal in a farm picture book, or a book that tells about the jungle, or a book on Natural History. When the outline of the animal has been neatly traced on the tracing cloth, it should be transferred to the cardboard from which the animal is to be made. When a child has obtained a clear outline in this way, he may next proceed to make the animals alive.

First, he must decide just the location of the animal’s joints. Where are the tiger’s paws fastened to his legs? Where are the grasshopper’s knees? Where, hidden underneath his shell are the turtle’s funny little flat feet attached to his body? Then, using the pattern which has just been made, a new pattern of the creature’s body is made, then a pattern of a leg, a tail, an ear, and these sections are all cut from the cardboard, separately, with scissors or the sharp jack-knife. In cutting out legs and paws, they should be made always a little longer than the original pattern to allow for the joint by which they are fastened to the body. As soon as all the parts of an animal have been cut from the cardboard, they should be laid in place and holes punched with a coarse needle or an awl at the joints. If the animal is a huge one, the collar buttons may be slipped in these holes to hold the sections together. In the case of the toy creatures shown in the picture, paper fasteners were used. When these joints have been made the toys will stand or sit, cock their ears or wag their tails, leap or run--in fact they will do anything a boy wishes.

The paints come next. It will be great fun to make the toy animals just the right color. A tiger may be such a gorgeous yellow with bright green eyes and black stripes. The grasshopper may be either green or a warm brown, and the turtle’s house which he must always carry around on his back should be painted gray.

These jointed animals may be persuaded to act out the children’s favorite stories and will furnish a new kind of fun for rainy afternoons in the house.

Little Brer Rabbit can be easily made of white cardboard from the pictures of Peter Rabbit or the rabbit pictures on an Easter card. Then Brer Rabbit and Old Man Terrapin may act out on the nursery table the famous race that Uncle Remus has told us about. A shoe box may be used for a miniature stage if it is placed on its side on a table, some scenery is painted in at the back and a little cloth curtain hung at the front. Through a hole in one end the jointed animals may be put in and they will perform most acceptably for an audience of dolls.

Two children playing together, or two groups of children can each make a set of jointed animals and then pose them to illustrate a favorite story, the other child or group guessing the story illustrated.

Many other plays will suggest themselves when one has a set of animals which are really alive and which a child has made, all himself.

YOUR OWN CIRCUS

It is going to be a circus small enough to fit in any house. In fact, it will be possible to put it within the boundaries of an old table. Because you can’t always have an outdoor show is just the reason that you are going to plan this fine, diminutive one in the house. It may take several days to get it ready, but once your indoor circus is finished, you will find it almost if not quite as interesting as a real one.

First, find an old table somewhere to be used as a circus ground. A pine table will serve nicely, and if you can find some old green muslin with which to cover it, you will discover that it looks exactly like the grass in the field where the real circus is held. Tack the muslin to the under side of the table top so that it will not wrinkle and interfere with the circus parade. Now you are ready for the rope fence which always encloses a circus ground.

In the four corners of the table bore, with a gimlet, through the canvas, some holes that are just the right size to hold dowel sticks, five inches long. You can buy these dowel sticks of a carpenter in foot lengths at a few cents each. Glue the posts in the holes which you have bored in the table and also bore extra holes for two more about a foot apart in the front of the table. These last little posts are for the gate to your circus ground. When the glue has set and the posts are perfectly dry, tie cord to one, near the top, and then stretch it to another, knotting it, until you have finished the rope fence that encloses the circus ground. If you like you can have two or three rows of cord, and you can print a little circus sign to pin to the gate. It may read:

THE GREAT AND ONLY ANIMAL SHOW

Clowns, Wild Beasts, and the Biggest Elephant
in the World.

Performances Every Afternoon and Evening.

Admission, Adults, two pins, Children, alone,
one pin.

COME ONE. COME ALL!

All around the edges of the bill you can draw pictures of wild animals with your colored pencils.

The circus ground will look very much pleasanter if you have a few trees standing about on the edges, and these trees will be useful, also, to tie some of your wild beasts to.

Meat skewers will do nicely for the tree trunks if you fringe ever so many narrow, doubled strips of green tissue paper, and wind them with it, fastening the fringes to the meat skewer with mucilage. The green paper flutters in the air quite like real foliage in the breeze on circus day, and the little trees will stand up nicely if you stick the end of each skewer inside an empty spool, glueing it there so that it will stay in place.

Did you think that you were never coming to the tent for your circus? Well, here it is, and the picture shows you just how to construct it. You will need to enlarge the diagram several times the size which you see in the picture, but that is easily accomplished by means of your ruler and lead pencil. Use some sort of tough, firm paper for the tent. Water color paper will be splendid because you can get out your paint box and paint pictures of wild men and palm trees and animals on the sides. If you have no water color paper, use brown bristol board. The latter makes a fine stiff tent. Cut out the top and sides as carefully as you can, bend them, and glue or paste them together. Then stand the tent up in the center of your circus ground.

The animals, next.

There are patterns for them, too, which you will see in the picture and which are so simple as to be very easily enlarged. The animals can be made of the same kind of paper which you used for the tent, and then painted, the elephant gray, the camel a soft brown and the deer a dull reddish color, or you can cut them out of wood. This is perhaps the better way. Use thin pieces of very soft, white wood. An excellent wood is holly or soft pine, in the thin sheets which are used for jig saw work, and for making picture puzzles. Draw the pattern of the animal which you wish to make first very carefully on your piece of wood. Give your best jack-knife two or three turns on a grindstone so that it will be nice and sharp, and then go to work cutting the animal, not your fingers. Make as many animals as you can, and glue their feet to tiny blocks of kindling wood so that they will stand. Touch them up a little with paint, too, to make them look wilder.

If you want cages for your animals use empty spool boxes, covers and all. Cut bars in the cover of each box with your jack-knife, stand the animal inside and put the cover back on. The box rests on cardboard wheels which are glued to the long, narrow side of the box.

A clever boy will be able to invent the acts for the circus. One can rig up trapezes and flying swings and tight rope appliances very easily by using strings and spools. One can paint flags of all nations or cut them from colored tissue paper to float from the roof of the tent, and this little home-made circus will be so attractive that all the other boys will want to make similar ones just as soon as they see it.

BEAD WORK FOR BOYS

There is not a boy but has gazed at the alluring Indian suits in the toy shop windows, wishing that he were able to buy one. It is so much easier to give a proper war whoop, and scare a few of the fellows, and execute a wild war dance, or even sit by a camp fire in the woods telling stories, if only he is dressed like a real, live Indian.

Why not make one’s own Indian suit?

It is perfectly possible for a boy to make himself a fine Indian shirt, fringed, and decorated with beads; a pair of beaded moccasins and a bead belt in which may be thrust a scalping knife, a bow and arrow and a few other implements of war. He may hang all his scalps to the belt, too.

The only materials needed for the suit will be three or four large chamois skins--or two yards of brown denim if the chamois seems too expensive for the young Indian’s pocketbook--some red and blue porcelain beads which may be bought in strings at any dry goods store for a few cents a string, a spool of heavy cotton thread, and a little patience. With a coarse needle, and a pair of scissors the boy will be ready for work. Making an Indian suit will fill a great many rainy afternoons full of fun.

The bead belt is the best part of the suit to begin with because a boy can experiment with designs as he weaves the beads together, and he will be able to form an idea of the pattern he wishes to use when he embroiders the shirt and the moccasins. One will need a bead loom on which to make the belt. These looms may be bought at a toy shop, but that is not really necessary. An old box will do quite as well for a loom. The belt in the picture was started on the cover of an old shoe box, and a cigar box with the cover and the bottom removed makes a fine bead loom. In making a loom from a wooden box, very small screw eyes may be put in the ends of the loom, about one quarter of an inch apart to hold the threads. In the card board cover shown in the picture, the warp threads--those are the lengthwise threads in the weaving--are held in place by pins to which they were knotted at the ends of the loom.

Fourteen threads are strung on the loom for a section of the belt, as tightly as the card board will allow of their being stretched. A needle is then threaded with the coarse cotton thread, and the end is tied to the warp thread at the top of the loom at the left. The needle is then brought out to the right below the warp strands, thirteen red beads--one less bead than the number of the warp strands, remember--are strung on the thread, and the beads are pressed up between the warp strands so that one bead comes between every two threads. The needle is then run back from right to left through the beads _above_ the warp threads. This makes one row of beads securely woven to the warp. For the second row of beads, six red beads, one blue one and six more red ones are strung, the blue bead forming the beginning of a simple design. The third row has three blue beads in the center, the fourth has five, the fifth three, and the sixth one, completing the design. A row of red beads is then woven in, after which the unit of design was repeated.

Many different designs will suggest themselves to the boy bead weaver. A checker board pattern of squares may be used, there may be a plain border at the edges of the belt, or a Greek fret may be introduced with charming effect.

When the section of the belt shown in the picture is finished, it may be removed from the loom, the ends of thread being tied securely about the last row of beads. A second section is strung on the loom, blue beads being strung first with a design of red in the center. Four sections, two red and two blue, may be sewed together to complete the gay little Indian belt.

Now for the Indian’s shirt. The pattern which is shown in the picture should be enlarged according to the scale, one and one half inches to a foot. If chamois skin is used for the shirt, probably one large and two smaller skins will need to be joined to give enough material, but if the shirt is made of brown denim, the pattern may be laid on a length of the cloth, without piecing, and the shirt is then cut. It will not be necessary to sew any seams in the shirt. It is folded over at the neck opening, and tied on the small boy with narrow strips of leather indicated in the picture. One strip of leather is tied under the arms, and the other about the hips. The bead embroidery finishes the neck and sides of the shirt. To do this embroidery, a needle is threaded with coarse linen thread, and knotted at the end. Starting at the right of the neck, and close to the edge, the needle is brought through to the outside of the shirt. Three beads are then strung. They are held down close to the shirt and the needle is thrust through the cloth to the inside again. The needle is then brought through, close to the first stitch, three more beads are strung, and the embroidery is continued. Red and blue beads should be alternated to form a design. This stitch described is the simplest one for a boy to use and it is most effective also, being the stitch used by the Indians when they embroidered their own shirts, moccasins, and leggins.

In starting the embroidery for the sides of the shirt, the bead border should be started about two inches from the edge, this margin being fringed carefully with sharp scissors after the beads are all sewed on. A design of beads, which may be varied according to the taste and skill of the boy who makes it, may ornament the front and the back of the shirt.

Moccasins sound very difficult to make, but here is a pattern all in one piece, with no troublesome uppers and soles to be fitted together. Chamois skin should be used, if possible, for the moccasins, or the light weight leather which may be bought at a craft shop for art work and can easily be sewed. When the pattern of the moccasin which is shown in the picture has been enlarged according to the scale--three inches to a foot--it is laid on the leather or chamois, and a pair of moccasins is cut out. It will be found easier to embroider the toe before the moccasin is sewed. The sewing which holds the moccasin in shape is done with very coarse thread in an over and over stitch. Narrow strips of leather may be used, also, for the joining, in which case, holes should be punched with a stiletto and awl to admit of the leather being passed through the material. After this joining is completed, the flap indicated in the picture is folded over on the dotted lines, and it is embroidered in the same pattern used to finish the neck and sides of the shirt.

If there is enough of the material that was used for the shirt left, two long, straight pieces may be cut, embroidered on the long edges, fringed, and tied about the Indian’s legs for leggins.

A most gorgeous headdress may be made for the Indian from crépe paper feathers. The feathers are made by fringing crépe paper and pasting this fringe to short lengths of flower wire. Gilt paint will make the feathers even more glorious, and when a number of them are finished, red, and blue, and green, and yellow--all the rainbow colors in fact--they may be wired to a headdress made of stiff cambric or heavy cardboard.

What shall we call the boy when he is dressed in his home-made chieftain’s suit, which will be more effective, even, than the one he saw in the toy shop? Hiawatha, perhaps, as he dons his war paint and feathers and starts in search of all sorts of interesting Indian adventures.

HOW TO MAKE STICK PICTURES

It is a new sort of fun that a boy can have with just plain, everyday, ordinary sticks. You can play at being an Indian, too, at the same time for the Indians did it first and called it picture-writing.

Suppose you were an Indian child in paint and feathers, and moccasins. Suppose that you never went to school, and never had seen a piece of paper or a lead pencil. Then suppose that you wanted to write a letter to your little red cousin who lived on the other side of the forest in another tribe, far away from yours.

Of course, you have ever so much to tell your little red cousin. You want him to know that the big chief, your father, has just put up a fine new wigwam of skins for you to live in, a more beautiful wigwam than any other in the village. You want the cousins to know, too, that the sap has begun to run in the maple tree and soon your mother, Laughing Water, will get out the big kettle and build a fire of pine branches and boil the fresh, sweet sap into maple sirup. Then there is a still more wonderful thing to tell your little red cousin. In the full of the last moon, a strange water creature was seen in the river in front of your wigwam. It was white, and large, and it had huge white wings that the wind filled. It was a pale face ship--much larger, and very different from an Indian’s canoe.

Now, how are you going to tell all these exciting things to the far-away little red cousin when you have no pencil and no paper for a letter, and there is no postman and no railway train to carry a letter to the other tribe? Why, it is going to be the easiest thing in the world to do. Make some stick pictures that will tell all the stories that you would like to write if you only knew how.

In the forest there is a fine old hunting ground. You know just the spot where all the tribes gather and build their great camp fires, and cook the game, and dance in the evening when the hunt is done. Before another moon your cousin’s tribe will be there. And you are going now, to the hunting ground, to make some stick pictures for that little Indian boy to find. Then he will understand that you have been there and you were thinking of him.

Jump into your canoe and paddle down the river. Tie the canoe fast to the bank, then jump out and plunge into the forest. You know the way to go, for the moss grows on the north side of the trees. There, you have come to a cleared spot in the deep, deep woods. There isn’t any sound save the chattering of the chipmunks. They won’t disturb your picture writing. Now you may go to work.

You break many of the straight, stout twigs from the pine tree. Some of the twigs must be long, and others you will break off short to fit together where there are corners in the pictures. There is a smooth bed of moss under the pine tree. That will be a splendid place for your picture writing. First, you will make a picture of the new wigwam. Just two long sticks, crossed at the top will make the outline, and you put two short sticks together to show the door. Now, for the maple tree. You will lay a long stick down on the moss to show the outline of the tree. Some shorter sticks, laid close to the sides of the longer stick make the branches. The pale face ship may be more difficult to make, but you will be able to outline the picture with your sticks. There are the sloping sides of the ship and there are the sails.

The picture letter is done. When the little cousin finds it there in the woods he will know all about the new wigwam, and the maple sirup, and the strange ship. You travel home again if you are a little Indian boy, and you don’t mind in the least not having a pencil, or a postman.

How may a little pale face child play at picture writing?

If it is vacation time, you can gather sticks in the woods just as the little Indian boy did. Be sure that they are long, straight ones, though. You may sit in the grass and lay your stick pictures on the lawn, or you may make them on the floor of the piazza.

If you want to make stick pictures in the house on a stormy day, ask mother to let you use her sewing table to put them on, or you can lay them on the kitchen floor, or the nursery hearth rug. For the indoor stick pictures, you can use burnt matches, or toothpicks, or clothes pins--anything long and straight will do. You can buy colored sticks at a kindergarten shop, and those will be the best of all for stick pictures. And if you have a game of jackstraws, the straws may be used for the pictures.

The Indians had no picture books, but you have. You can play a game with the stick pictures. You can make pictures to illustrate one of your favorite stories, and then ask the boy or girl who is playing with you to try and guess what the story is that fits the picture.

A splendid story to illustrate with stick pictures is The Three Bears.

Here is their house.

Here is the table that held the three bowls of porridge.

Here are their three chairs.

And here are their three beds.

A TOY INDIAN VILLAGE

Just fancy an encampment of real, live Indians in the house in a little Indian village that you made all yourself! It will be the best sort of fun to make the camp, and when it is done it will be a fine, new plaything for all winter long, as the toy Indians have sham fights, and May dances and tell each other stories around their tiny camp fires. And this is the way to make the fascinating toy.

A long, shallow tin with very narrow sides is the foundation for the Indian village. The tinsmith has large sheets of bright new tin, and he will make you one of these shallow tin trays for just a few cents. The florist will give you a basket of soft, black earth--enough to fill the tray--and you can mold and pat it into tiny hills and queer little valleys, and long foot paths, no wider than your little finger for the toy Indians to trail up and down.

You must take a long walk now as far as the woods to find some sprays of white pine, hemlock, and spruce for the Indians’ trees. Gather some little straight twigs, too, for wigwam foundations, and if the ground is still bare, pick up some of the prettiest pebbles you can find for make-believe rocks in the Indian encampment. With your jack-knife strip from the birch tree just a very little bark to make an Indian canoe--not much, for it takes a birch a long, long time to grow more bark. Then you may go home again, but on the way, buy a penny’s worth of grass seed at the florist’s. What are you to do with all these things?

Just listen, and you will find out.

Scatter the grass seed very softly over the earth in your tray and sprinkle it with the rubber bulb sprayer that mother uses for her house ferns. You would not believe it perhaps, but in a week or ten days your little Indian camp ground will be covered with a carpet of soft, green grass really growing in the earth. After you have planted the grass seed, stick the little evergreen trees in the earth and lay your pebbles about as if they really belonged there on the ground. In one corner of the tray, if mother is willing, you may sink a shallow, round cake tin filled with water to make a miniature lake, and about the lake you can put a border of stones covered with the moss that comes in a box of Noah’s Ark animals. The tray of earth is quite transformed now into a tiny forest.

Under the trees the Indian wigwams are scattered. Making these tepees is ever so much fun and will fill a long winter evening after your lessons are learned and you have the library table free to work on. Fig. 1 shows you how to cut out an Indian wigwam, and heavy dark brown paper or brown canvas is a strong material to use. When the wigwam is cut, it may be decorated with paints in any design you wish. A border of small squares is an attractive decoration, or some grotesque heads and bows and arrows may be painted on. Gold or red paper stars and crescents and suns may be cut and glued to the outside of the wigwam, forming a very gay scheme of trimming it, or very tiny autumn leaves may be waxed and glued on. When a number of these little wigwams have been cut, decorated, and glued together, as shown in Fig. 2, place them in your play forest, using two or three twigs crossed for supports, the ends extending through the hole in the top of the wigwam.

Now you can make the Indians. English walnuts form the heads. These are just the right size, brown enough for the complexion of any Indian, and nicely wrinkled, too. With a sharp jack-knife smooth down a few of the walnut’s wrinkles, and carve the Indian’s features, trying to give him high cheek bones. Color his cheeks with vermilion and paint his face, too, in as many different colors as you like. A roll of stiff paper or cloth glued to the nut head makes the Indian’s body, about which is wrapped a blanket of fringed crépe paper, red flannel, or any sort of gay stuff that mother will give you. This walnut Indian wears a marvelous feather headdress. The feathers come from the chicken yard or the oldest feather duster--whichever source is available--and they are glued to a strip of brown paper which, in turn is glued to the little Indian’s head.

There should be a whole tribe of Indians, as many as you can make before bedtime, and when it comes morning run up to the play room and stand the Indian braves at the doors of their wigwams or in the little path between the trees where they can see their real green grass coming up, and enjoy the friendly shelter of their fine little camping ground.

These nut Indians will need bows and arrows when they have sham battles. Tiny twigs may be bent bow shape with rubber bands for bow strings and burned out matches may be sharpened to a point for arrows. Toothpicks make arrows, too. A bow and a bundle of arrows may be laid at the door of each little Indian’s wigwam. The canoe that floats on the tin pan lake is made of a strip of folded birch bark shaped at the ends like a real canoe and stitched with brown linen thread. It will really float if it is carefully made.

For a camp fire, pile up some broken twigs in a cleared spot in your Indian encampment and put in some scraps of twisted, red tissue paper which will look like flames. One of the kettles from the dolls’ kitchen may hang on a forked stick over this make-believe fire to cook the dinner for the walnut Indian tribe.

This play Indian village will last all winter, a comfortable camping ground for the tribe, and a delightful plaything for the clever boy who made it.

There may be some walnut squaws added perhaps, and some peanut papooses wrapped in blankets cut from a scrap of old chamois and hung contentedly by thread to the sheltering trees. The grass will grow so high that it may have to be mowed with the nursery scissors, and when the trees fade, more can be gathered and put in the places of the old ones.

CORN TOYS AND HOW TO MAKE THEM

Corn cobs really look as if they would like to play. There is a whole binful out in the barn, and the chickens do not want them and neither does the farmer. He will make a big bonfire out in the wood lot some day and burn up all the corn cobs if the children do not take possession of them first, and help them to play by making them into toys.

What fine, long, straight little logs they are for a log cabin, or they might be made into Indian or toy rafts, or a rail fence, or almost anything else a child chooses.

First you can make a little rail fence that stretches across one corner of the barn floor. To do this, lay down six corn cobs in zigzag fashion on the floor with the ends not quite as far apart as the cobs are long. Then across every two cob ends lay another cob and finish the fence in this way, making it very snug.

Behind the fence lives Apple Johnny. He owns the farm whose boundary lines the fence marks out on the floor. Apple Johnny has a little hard apple for his head joined by a toothpick to a fat apple that forms his body. His legs and arms are twigs and his face is cut with a jack-knife in the smaller apple. Apple Johnny has a herd of wild potato horses on his farm. Each potato has four twig legs, and a flowing mane, made of a fringed corn husk pinned to the long end of the potato, and a straw tail pinned to the other end.

As you put the last corn cob in the fence, you heard the rain just pouring and pouring on the barn eaves. Suppose the roof of the barn should cave in and the whole inside be flooded! What would poor little Apple Johnny do, and how would he ever make his escape? Apple Johnny must have a raft. Select six more corn cobs from the binful, all of them just the same length, and lay them down on the barn floor, side by side. In one of the corners of the barn is an old last summer’s berry basket. Strip off two bits of the binding rim as long as the row of cobs is wide. Nail one to each end of the row of corn cobs, putting a nail in each cob, which holds the small raft firmly in place. Then turn the raft right side up and to one end nail a long, straight twig for a mast, to which you can glue a white paper sail. It is a fine little raft when it is completed, and strong enough to carry Apple Johnny and a potato horse or two safely through any possible flood.

But Apple Johnny has no house. Well, a house is easily planned when one has a whole bin of corn cobs to draw upon for building materials.

Gather an armful of cobs and make a corn-cob house. Lay two corn cobs opposite each other, and two more across the ends, log cabin fashion, driving nails through to hold them together. Next, put two more corn cobs over the first two and two more over the second, until the house is twice as high as Apple Johnny is tall. For a roof, nail two sides of the berry basket to the log cabin, and then with a rip saw cut out a front door high enough to let Apple Johnny step through. There will be rather wide chinks in the house, but you can play that these are windows through which Apple Johnny can watch for the corn-cob Indians and shoot at them with a twig musket when he sees them coming.

You can make a whole tribe of these corn-cob Indians, and it will be the most fun of all, even jollier than making a corn-cob fence, and a raft, and a house. First, wind corn husks around a cob to make the Indian’s clothes, but leave one end, the larger end of the cob, uncovered because that is going to be the Indian’s head. Then on this end, mark a face with a bit of charcoal; eyes, nose, and mouth; and paint the cheeks red with a crushed cranberry, rubbing the juice on the corn cob. The hens’ nests in the barn are full of ever so many pretty feathers, so you can collect as many of these as you wish and glue them to the corn-cob Indian’s head for his headdress. Last of all, ask mother if she is willing to give you a few pieces of the left over plain cloth from sister’s school dress for the corn-cob Indian’s blanket. Of course mother is willing. Almost every mother is willing to give a boy things when he is trying to amuse himself all alone. She may even cut a square of gay plaid from the piece of cloth itself and turn out all the pieces from her sewing bag, where there are other scraps just right for Indians’ blankets; red flannel, and gray serge like your last winter suit, and brown merino, and yellow silk.

The Indian looks very splendid indeed in his feather headdress and a red plaid blanket. All he needs then is a bow and quiver of arrows. The bow you can make by bending a length of willow and tying a piece of cord across. The arrows are shorter, pointed twigs with a very small hen’s feather tied to the end of each.

This Indian you can name Chief Big Cob.

HOW TO MAKE A MARBLE BAG

Nobody knows why the first of March brings marbles, but it certainly does. Some games really belong to the season in which they come as coasting and snowfights, but other games are played at certain times of the year for no reason except that they always have been and always will be. If some one should ask a boy--any boy, why it wouldn’t be better to play football in the summer and baseball at Thanksgiving time, he couldn’t tell you, but his sense of the fitness of things would be outraged.