A good variation from making scrap-books for a children’s hospital, especially if the workers happen to be few, is to use large cards, preparing them like the different pages of a picture scrap-book, but leaving them separate. Then they can be easily handed from one bed to another; and, as they can be divided among the different children, they can be seen by many at once without waiting till enough whole scrap-books can be filled. Ten Juniors can easily prepare fifty cards in a single afternoon, but the pictures will be most interesting if weeks are spent in collecting them.

Take large white or delicately tinted cards about eighteen inches long and twelve inches wide. Paste on them gay pictures cut from advertising cards and other sources, arranging them according to taste. One card could be a menagerie, or a “Noah’s ark,” with a long procession of animals winding all around from top to bottom. Such a card once made had an array that would have astonished Noah. There were dancing bears, and elephants with howdahs on their backs, and circus horses, and monkeys dressed like Italian lazzaroni, and pigs with apples in their mouths, and even a Christmas turkey carried on the heads of three geese. Another card could be made up entirely of flowers or of flowers, birds, and butterflies. Another could contain ships, sea-gulls, fishes, and some shells on a supposed beach at the bottom. Funny groups of people doing all sorts of things can be arranged.

Some of the figures can be cut from newspapers or old magazines; if bright colors are desired, a paintbox can be brought into service, but usually the uncolored pages are very acceptable mixed in with those cut from colored plates and cards.

Sometimes figures cut from stiff cards will not be easy to paste, but by spreading them (on the wrong side, of course) with a rather thin boiled flour paste, and letting them lie for a few moments, they become softer and more pliable.