Purple.—“On cotton for two pounds: Boil four ounces of sumac in four gallons of water, then dip your yarn for half an hour; wring, air, and put it in again over night, then take out and wring. Boil in seven gallons of water one pound four ounces of logwood for one hour; take three gallons of the logwood liquor and dip your yarn in it for twenty minutes, then add three quarts of the logwood liquor and dip for twenty minutes, then put in the remainder and dip for twenty minutes, then wring out and dry your yarn.”
The wringing process given in the last two recipes is for cotton yarn; cotton cloth or woollen cloth should never be wrung out; simply lift it from the dye with two sticks, immerse it in clear cold water, if you are to rinse it, then hang it up and let it drip. All material must be perfectly clean and thoroughly soaked before being put in the dye.
Note.—“In boiling, all drugs and barks that will not dissolve ought to be put in a thin, coarse bag and taken out before you dip, and the liquor should be settled. Dip only in clear liquor.”
CHAPTER XIV
A PEANUT NOAH'S ARK
Changing one thing into another is always interesting, and the most charming part of a Peanut Noah’s Ark is that you can transform these ground-nuts into any and every kind of wild creature. At your command they will come trooping from all parts of the tangled jungle, the elephants leading and tigers, lions, bears, wolves, kangaroos, giraffes, and others following. Ever so many insects, too-the curious peanut spider, actually as large as one of those mammoth Southern tarantulas which often travel North on bunches of bananas, and the enormous hard-shelled hornet, whose sting will not hurt half as badly as its smaller cousins who are alive and whose nests are large and round, dark gray in color and appear as if made of paper. In addition to these you can have beetles of different kinds, grasshoppers, and various sorts of moths.
With the help of bits of paper and some wooden toothpicks the ground-nuts may be transformed into
Denizens of Earth, Air, and Water.
First we will catch the terrible hornet, but to get him you must select a peanut as near like Fig. 312 as you can find. This is for the thorax or chest; choose a longer nut, resembling Fig. 313, for the abdomen or body. Take six common wooden toothpicks for the legs (Fig. 314), and bend each stick until it fractures near the centre without breaking (Fig. 315). For the waist use a short piece of toothpick (Fig. 316). For the sting take a pin (Fig. 317). To insert the sting in the body make a small hole on the lower side and thrust in the pin so that the point will project from the tail; push the head of the pin into the nut until it is out of sight, as shown by dotted lines in Fig. 317, 2A. This diagram gives the point of the pin as it stands out from the nut. Join the chest and body by thrusting one end of Fig. 316 into Fig. 312 and the other end into Fig. 313, leaving a small length of Fig. 316 exposed to represent the slender waist of the hornet, as shown in Fig. 318. This done, put three legs on each side of the insect by forcing the toothpicks into the thorax or chest peanut (Fig. 318).
