HAVING a tent out in the garden or on the lawn during the summer vacation makes each long, happy day twice as long, and just twice as happy. A boy can play that he is an Indian, or a first settler, or a cave dweller, or even an old story book king if he has even the crudest kind of a roof over his head and some sort of a play shelter beneath which he can live and play, and dream all manner of delightful things.

Of course the nicest tent of all is one from a real tent factory made of canvas and having staples and pegs to fasten it to the ground, but such a tent costs ever so much money, and not every mother and father can afford to buy it. One family of children went without fireworks on Fourth of July that they might save the money which they would have, otherwise, burned up and with it they bought themselves a tent which lasted much longer than the smoke and noise of the fireworks would have.

There is, though, a very fine tent indeed, and one that will give a group of boys quite as much pleasure as any manufactured one. This is the home-made tent. It is the tent that seems to really belong to you because it is a sort of a makeshift and you make it with your own hands. There are ever so many ways of making your own tent, all of them simple and quite easy for one to follow.

One very strong and serviceable tent has a foundation of straight, young birch trees or saplings cut in the early spring and used for tent poles. Holes should be dug, and the poles set in the ground a quarter their length that no summer wind storm can uproot them. Around each pole, the earth is then pounded down, and the tops of the poles, six or eight in number, should be lashed together with cord. A couple of old army blankets may be stitched together to make a covering for this tent. A hole is cut in the center and the covering is slipped over the supports and tied to the base of each pole. There will be enough extra blanket to make a flap in the front of the tent to act as a door. If there is a summer shower when the children are playing in this blanket tent they may pull the flap tight shut, and just snuggle inside, listening to the raindrops that do not soak through the blanket covering one bit.A second home-made tent has a foundation of bean poles or clothes poles for supports. These are sunk in the ground and fastened together at the top as were the saplings used for the blanket tent. The covering, however, is of brown denim. Twelve yards will make a very good-sized tent. The lengths are cut to fit the poles used as tent supports; they are pointed at the top, and stitched together. Tape sewed at the top, center, and base of each seam, on the inside, may be tied around the poles and fasten the covering to the props. This tent may be decorated in such a way that it will make a real patch of color on the lawn or in the back yard, and will have the appearance of an Indian’s wigwam. Red and green, or yellow denim is used for the decorations. Small conventionalized trees, moons, stars, leaves, or any preferred designs are cut from the colored cloth and stitched to the brown covering. Another way of decorating the denim tent is to paint pictures on it with stencil colors, using stencil patterns of Indians, animals, or flowers. These colors are “fast” and the rain will not wash them off as is apt to happen in the case of designs applied with colored cloth.

A flower tent is a new sort of playhouse and is quite delightful in sunshiny weather. When it rains you can watch your tent grow from the house windows. It will be wise to select a fence corner, where a row of castor beans will sprout in a night almost to help form the back of the tent. Between these castor plants, there may be some quick-growing vine planted; mock orange, morning glory, or moon flower. As the seeds sprout and the vines begin to grow, they should be twined upon strings which extend up the fence and across the top between the two sides of the fence, forming the tent roof. Before summer is over, this roof will be a thick one as the vines increase their leaves and the leaves themselves grow larger and more lavish of their shade. After a while they will hang over the front of the tent helping to form a third side, and when the tent bursts into blossom the children who live inside it will feel almost as if they were in fairyland.

These tents all take time to make, but there are other home-made tents that can spring up in a day in the garden. A very little boy can set up grandfather’s big green umbrella for a tent and have a pleasant time sitting under it. The handle can be buried a little way in the ground and there will be plenty of room beneath its delightful green shade for a boy and a picture book, or a little girl and her doll. To make this umbrella tent still more snug and sheltering, grandmother’s shawl can be draped around it, or a rug may be pinned to the edges to form the back and walls.

Two boys who live next door to each other and are the friendliest of neighbors can make a tent that they can share. The village carpenter will furnish four stout pine posts a little taller than the fence between the boys’ homes is high. Two of these posts are set up on one side of the fence about eight feet from the fence itself, and two on the other side in just the same position. The ticking cover of an old feather bed may be cut down to the right size, and nailed to the posts for a roof. A couple of old sails may be cut into straight curtains for the sides of the tent, with strips of lath in the hem so that they can be rolled up in pleasant weather. The tent is very cozy when it is finished, and before the summer is over nearly every boy in town will have been up to visit these boys in their little two-room tent.