“Let’s try birds and butterflies! Oh, Joyce, the crow sent Katherine a letter this morning and it told how to make those pin-wheels and birds and butterflies, too,” explained Jimsi. “And Henry said he’d make toy money for a store and we could play that, too!”
“I wish it was real money,” Henry joked, as he snipped big pieces from Jimsi’s wall-paper book—big pieces of silver satin stripe for silver money. “I’m going to make five and ten dollar bills next. Oh, you wait!” He sat down on the floor and began to cut regardless of the floor.
“Look out,” sang Jimsi. “Put a paper down, Henry! Joyce and I are careful. It makes ever so much muss to clear up when you cut like that. Here’s a newspaper.” So Henry meekly apologized. “I wasn’t thinking,” he explained.
Joyce and Jimsi began on butterflies. When they had made ever so many, they made birds—whole flocks of birds: bluebirds, crows, robins, catbirds, and most every kind of bird one could think of, as well as a good many pink and yellow birds that nobody could identify as ever having lived anywhere at all.
They pretended that the big table was a store and Henry brought all manner of things from around the room to put on it and sell, he said. Joyce was store-keeper. As for baby Katherine, she preferred to play on the floor with the paper toys, and she played in her own way.
Henry showed the little lame girl about how to make scrapbooks and they were busy choosing a paper for her first scrapbook when suddenly the door-bell rang. Joyce’s mother went to the door. There was nobody there! Then her eyes suddenly fell to the door-step and there, sure enough, was a crow letter! Beside it was—why, it was the cutest of paper baskets! It was filled with cut flowers. The letter was for Joyce. The basket that came with it was, of course, for her, too.
Why, the basket was made out of wall paper! Would you believe it? Yes, it was! But the flowers in it were really, really true—they weren’t wall-paper flowers. Joyce took them from the basket and Jimsi went for a vase. “Why, we can make baskets like that,” she declared. “I think crow’s letter must be about it.” She tore open the envelope. She glanced over the letter. No. All crow said was:
“Dear Joyce:
Maybe you’d like this basket of flowers. I made the basket part with my book of magic paper just to send these flowers to you.
Your loving
Crow Caw Caw.”