The legs look rather better if cut out separately and glued to the sides.
The Tumbling Clown or Monkey. Cut out cardboard or wooden animals similar to those in Part I, Chapter XX, but use no lead. Now, instead of swinging them on a perch, make a hole at B where they stand; take a piece of copper wire, about 1/8 inch thick and 6 inches long.
Bend it slightly as in Fig. 463. Pass the wire through the hole in the animal, so that the animal fits tightly on it exactly in the middle of wire.
The animals are best cut out of thick cardboard. Fig. 464 shows a suitable animal, and the following from Chapter XX—Figs. 256, 257, 259, 263 and 264—can be adapted. As no lead can be used for the purpose to which we are now going to put them, animals that balance without lead, as in Fig. 464, are the most suitable. Therefore in designing them, one must take care that the hole B is exactly at the centre of gravity, and the bend of body, D (that is widest part of body), just below B.
Fig. 465
To make the Monkey tumble. Cut a piece of wood 12 inches by 2½ inches, and fix parallel bars to this as in Fig. 465. File or cut notches in the ends at A, to keep the monkey from tumbling off in his zeal. Now put the wire with the monkey in the middle across one end of the rails. Push the monkey head over heels and he will go on solemnly turning over and over, however long the rails are, until he lands in safety in the notches at the other end. It is the bend in the wire and carefully balanced body of the monkey that makes him behave so delightfully.
The longer the stand is the better, for then two or three clowns, monkeys and cockatoos can follow each other rapidly.
Fig. 466