Material Required to Make a Box Fort: a deep, square box with its cover. A round hair-pin box and a spool will make a cannon for the fort.

Would you like to make a fort for your leaden soldiers? Shall I tell you how to do it? If your soldiers are small, a box three inches deep may answer for the building. Its cover forms ramparts of the fort.

To start the building of your fort, turn your box over upon its rims so that its base becomes the top of the building. Take the box cover off and lay it aside.

Find a pencil and mark the openings for guns. They are made like windows upon the box front. Draw each about a half-inch square, and use your ruler to make each opening even. Cut these squares out, if you wish. They may also be painted black, should you prefer not to cut them out.

To add ramparts to the building, take the cover of your box and make a pencil mark upon its rim every half-inch all the way around. Cut sections from the rim, as marked, every other half-inch. Turn the box with its rim upward and glue it to the top of your box. (For making ramparts, see Diagram Three, page 172.)

At the back of the fort, you may easily devise a sallyport by cutting the cardboard door shaped. (For cutting a door, see Diagram Two, A, page 167.)

A toy cannon may be made with a small round hair-pint box by pasting it upon the side of a spool between the wheels of the spool. A thumb-tack pressed beneath one wheel of the cannon will keep it upright and prevent rolling. I painted my guns black. If you like, you may easily do this with water-color paints.

An encampment of tents may be made from small white box covers cut through each long side rim up to the top of the cover and bent, to each side of the center downward. (See Diagram Three, E, page 171, for making a tent.)

If you happen to have a penny flag, it will be just the very thing to wave over Fort Box.

You can arrange your fort upon a sheet of crape paper and make streams and woods all about it. The streams will be strips of silver paper pasted onto the green crape paper. The woods will be bits of twigs pressed into the holes of spools so that the trees stand upright. Bushes are just bits of twigs that may be laid down flat. Rocks and mountains may be made from stones.