To tell a boy that it is great sport to fly kites is to tell him something he already knows very well. He understands perfectly what these winds that blow in the early part of spring were intended for.
To make a kite of the ordinary pattern, one needs only a lath, a piece of flat, pliable wood, and plenty of string, paper, and paste.
The lath is for the upright, B and D in the illustration, and the thin piece of wood, which should be three-fourths of the length of the lath, and half an inch wide, must be securely fastened by its exact middle to the upper end of the lath, as at E, and brought down to a bow by the cord at C. This cord should be passed with a double turn round the upright at F, to keep it from slipping, and care must be taken to balance the two sides of the kite most accurately, to prevent the kite from being lopsided. Now carry a string, as in the figure, from E to C, thence to G, to A, and back to E, fastening it securely at each point. Next paste sheets of paper together until you have one large enough to cover the whole framework, with a margin of at least two inches to lap over. Lay the skeleton upon this, cut away the superfluous paper all round, then lap the margin over the edges, and paste it firmly down. Having firmly secured this, cut some slips of paper about three inches wide, and paste them along and over the cross strings so as to secure them firmly to the main sheet, and treat the upright in the same manner, though, of course, with a wider strip.
For the wings or tassels to be attached at the points A and C, take two strips of paper of a length and width proportioned to the size of the tassel required, snip these across like a comb, roll them up, and bind the uncut ends tightly with a string; the tassel for the tail is to be made in the same manner. The ordinary way of making the tail is by fastening slips of paper at intervals of about six inches along a piece of string. Now these bits of paper serve no purpose whatever save to become entangled with each other. A good long piece of string with a tassel at the end answers all purposes, and is much more graceful! The tail should be from fifteen to twenty times as long as the kite.
In selecting the string for the kite, get it as light and strong as possible; if it is too heavy, the kite will not be able to carry so much weight very high, and if it is not strong, the kite will very likely break away. The string is not fastened directly to the kite, but to another string, which, doubled, is attached to the upright in the following way: If the kite be four feet long, one end of this band is fastened about ten inches from the top, and the other about twenty inches from the bottom, and should be slack enough to hang in a loop about twelve or eighteen inches in length. As to where the string should be fastened to the band, that can only be told by experimenting until one finds out at just what point the kite will balance.
To start the kite in the first instance it is almost absolutely necessary to have some aid, two persons being required, one to hold the kite up and help it off, while the other, holding the string, runs a short distance against the wind to increase its pressure upon the kite, and thus help it to get its tail fairly off the ground, after which the kite will do very well by itself.
[THE CRUISE OF THE WALNUT SHELL.]
