BOYS.
If boys desire a hammer, nails, boards, &c., do not deny them. When a baby girl commences to play with a doll, a baby boy will pound, or pretend to hammer nails, or drive horses. It is useless to attempt to make boys love quiet sports. Set aside some spare spot in your house, where the noise will not disturb your household, or, what is better, build a little work-room especially for their use. It will be money well invested. Thus by early cultivating their tastes and by giving them employment, seed may be sown which will yield an abundant harvest.
Mothers! do not, by yielding to your over-sensitive nerves, stupefy your boys. If they are good for anything, they must and will make a noise. It is better to let them have a place of their own, but you should frequently inspect their work or play, and let them see you are interested in all they do. If they make you a flower frame, praise it, and if they show a taste for mechanics suggest to them other useful articles to be constructed, such as boxes, silk-winders, &c. When you make presents give them tools. Encourage them also by judicious rewards, to keep their room neat and their tools in order.
The following simple directions for making a few useful articles may be of service to boys who like to exercise their mechanical ingenuity.
Flower Frames.
Simple frames are made by taking two long narrow strips of wood and several small ones of different lengths, and nailing the latter to the long ones at equal distances apart, or a still better way is to make holes in the long strips and insert the ends of the short ones. When they are finished paint them green. These frames can be made in the form of a partly opened fan. A square frame can easily be made. The prettiest frames are made of willows, wire, or rattans. Take strips of wood and burn or bore holes through them at equal distances. Then insert the wire, or rattan, or willow, and twist them around in different forms, fastening the ends firm; then paint or varnish them.
Boxes.
Pretty boxes can be made of any common wood, by simply staining them with asphaltum varnish. Then varnish with several coats of copal. After they are well dried, take some pumice-stone and polish them. If necessary, varnish carefully once again. Your common pine wood will then be turned into black walnut, highly polished. Picture frames, brackets, little book-racks, stands, crickets, and even sleds and wagons can easily be made by an ingenious boy, and stained in this manner or painted. Your sisters can ornament them with leather work made to imitate carved wood. If you are puzzled in making any of these articles, go to any workshop and the workmen will tell you how to make them, if you speak properly to them. Never say, my dear boys, you have nothing to do.