Fig.90 - The stealthy, prowling Leopard.
From the brilliant-orange tiger-lily, with its dark-brown or black spots, we are going to make a—tiger? No, a leopard. Tiger-lilies may have spots, but tigers, you know, are striped.
It is really wonderful how much this little animal, made of parts of a beautiful flower and broom-straws, looks like the stealthy, prowling, wild creature which lives in Africa and Asia. The yellow coat of the live leopard is covered with black spots, and so is that of our flower leopard. The fierce living animal has a long tail that it moves slowly back and forth in anger or when it threatens to attack another animal or a man. Our little leopard also has a long tail which, if it does not really move, looks as if it were just going to. But while the live animal is ferocious and will kill, we can only pretend that of the tiger-lily leopard. Though he looks dangerous, he cannot even nibble a green leaf.
The illustration of the tiger-lily given here is a drawing of the one from which the lily leopard ([Fig. 90]) was made. You will notice that at the right of the flower ([Fig. 91]) there is the stem and pistil of a blossom that has fallen apart.
Fig.91 - The leopard is made from a Tiger Lily like this.
When we make the leopard we cut off this lily-stem close to the stalk, leaving the pistil attached, to use for the back-bone and tail. Four broom-straws, about an inch and a half long and sharpened at one end, we use for legs. The pointed ends of two of the legs are pushed into the stem at the front, and the other two in part of the pistil at the back, as shown in [Fig. 92]. That makes the skeleton.