WHITTLED SCHOOL BOX CHAMOIS MARBLE BAG
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN SCHOOL BOX
EVERY boy needs a pencil box. Plain little oblong boxes most of them, with a flat hinged cover, and a little lock that you keep carefully fastened with the key. That is, a boy locks his pencil box when he is able to find the key, but whether it was in his pocket, or fastened to his watch chain, the school-box key always does manage to get away, somewhere—to make its escape.
One day, however, the boy sees displayed in the window of a stationery shop, a new sort of pencil box, a most fascinating kind. The cover of the box is made of narrow strips of wood fastened side by side like the strips in the top of a roll-top desk, and when the shopman opens the pencil box to show the boy the inside, the cover just slides right back out of sight, while the boy looks on in open-eyed astonishment. The shopman’s supply of these magic boxes is limited, though, and there is a wild scramble for their possession among the boys who can produce ten cents—for that is the exorbitant price charged by the shopman. The boy wants one of those magic boxes. His fingers just tingle and burn to hold one and try to make the cover slide in its charming way, but he has only five cents, he can’t buy one.
The boy will be able to make his own pencil box, though, and this is the way he must go about it in order to construct one of those fascinating, roll-top ones, just like the one in the shop window.
In the first place, a boy must know how to whittle. All that he needs in the way of material is a jack-knife, some pieces of wood three-sixteenths of an inch thick, some more pieces an eighth thick, a strip of white cloth, and some little three-eighth inch nails.