It is easy to say, give things away, but, my stars! how hard it is to decide which to give. One just can't give away the new things, and one feels so fond of the old ones, when one gets them out and looks at them. The only way to part with them is to think of Saint Martin cutting his cloak in two for the beggar, or something inspiring like that. Even then one feels a little dreary.
Once there was a little girl whose family moved into a smaller house. There was not room in her new play-house for the many things she had in her old one. Some of them had to be given away. One decision was so hard to make that she remembered about it after she was a grown-up woman. There was a little green wagon with yellow wheels, which she had always had, and which her older sisters had played with before she was born, and there was a little orange-coloured cart with four red wheels, which her father had brought out from town, a week or two before, filled with soap.
Two wagons were too many for the new play-house, and mother said keep the green one, because the other was only an "advertisement"; and the older sisters said keep the green one, because it was better and they had played with it; and father just smiled and said, "You must decide."
When no one was looking, the little girl took the little orange-coloured wagon with four red wheels, and the big letters round the outside, which made it an "advertisement," and put it in the box mother was packing for some other children, and it hurt so to do it that she could not quite help crying.
Some of us are troubled more with having too few things than too many, are we not? We can make a game of getting out of this trouble. We must all be discoverers and inventors, and if there is something needed in the play-house, we must keep our eyes wide open to see what else will do or what we can find to make into the thing we want. It spoils the hunt, and the surprise, if some one else tells you what to do, but one or two little things will show what the game is like. For instance, if it is a bed you need, try a strong pasteboard box, not very deep. If you mind its having no legs, then you must go on a journey and have it a berth on a car or a ship.
A cigar-box makes a good trunk for a small doll, especially the boxes which have trays in them. A doll with a cigar-box trunk will never have moths in her clothes.
Paper napkins are useful for dolls' tablecloths, and for napkins when they are cut into small squares. They will even do for sheets, if mother cannot spare us white "pieces" that are big enough. A bandanna handkerchief, or a scrap of bright calico, makes a good bedquilt.
Shells we have brought home from a day at the beach are convenient for dishes. Radiators are splendid stoves. And did you ever find out how much closet room there is under a bed? With the help of a few pins, one can hang all the dolls' clothes from the springs, and shut them in with the counterpane, if it happens to be a long one. But if mother does not want you to do this, you mustn't.
You will be able to make a great many discoveries and inventions, if you think what you want, and then think what to make it out of. But the best and most wonderful thing about a play-house is, that if we have to, we can make one anywhere, or out of anything. Once, two little girls wrote home about a visit they had paid, "We had two rag dolls and we played house." Even one little girl, without so much as a rag doll, can have a play-house. She has only to imagine, that is, pretend, and there it is—with rooms, and staircases, and people, and everything needful. It can be big or little; and in the country or in the city. She can do the washing, or give a dinner party; take care of a sick doll, or work in the garden, just as she pleases. It is easier and happier to play with the pleasant things people give us, and to be able to see and touch most of the things in our play-houses, but we always want some imagined things, too. And if it should happen that we are in a place where we "have nothing to play with," then we can imagine and pretend, and go and play in the play-house we always have with us. In a second, we can build it into a wigwam, or a palace, or a cave, or a great castle, or it can be just the house we live in when we are at home.