Now fasten the vise securely on a shelf somewhere, and swing the weight to and fro like the pendulum of a clock. The dodo will bob first his head and then his tail and then his head again, and you can almost hear him calling “Do-do” way off on the mountain there. He’s a source of never-ending fun, boys, and besides playing with him yourself, you can just watch and see how few grown-ups can go by him and resist swinging the pendulum.
A FLEET OF TOY BOATS
WHO remembers the mill pond down at the farm, clean, and high, with trees all about—a capital place for sailing boats? It is so small that, directly a toy ship is started on its voyage, you can run around the other side and meet her.
There is the trout brook, too, down in the woods, where everything is cool and still. There isn’t a sound as you sit on the bank save when a mouse comes rustling along, pushing his way through the leaves with his queer little pointed nose, or a hedgehog plods by, blind and deaf, never seeing you at all.
If you should launch a toy boat in the brook, where do you suppose it would sail to? You will follow it a little way. Sometimes it will get caught in the ferns, or it may lie for a minute, stranded, on a rock, or it will overturn as it shoots the rapids. You start it on again with the long pole you cut from the willow tree, but presently the boat will sail away, out of a child’s sight, down the brook.
Perhaps it will pick up a crew of little brownie sailor men. Perhaps it will stop somewhere to load a cargo of butterfly’s gowns. You will lose sight of it though. That is what always happens to one’s toy ships.
A boy can make himself a whole fleet of toy boats to play with in the mill pond and the trout brook. If one of them does go sailing away to Fairyland—why, what does it matter with all the rest of the fleet just tugging away at their ropes, waiting to be launched?
The little boats are the nicest of all, because one may have so many of them. Out in the woods there are some of last year’s walnuts lying on the ground. Split one in half with a jack-knife, and take out all the meat, leaving the inside smooth and white. Glue a scrap of paper to a toothpick, and fasten this little mast to the inside of the half walnut shell with a drop of glue. There is a real fairy craft, fit for a dragon fly to ride in. Just watch it toss and float and sail away on the make-believe waves.