These can be made of bandboxes or orange-boxes and can be either very simple or as elaborate as you please. If cardboard boxes are used, Figure 113 shows how it can most easily be arranged to give the pitch of the roof. One story may be piled on another so that the house can be enlarged at will. Doors and windows are easily cut in the cardboard boxes. The windows can also be glazed if you get a few rolls of cinematograph film and fit and paste it on, but children must be warned that this is very inflammable and it is dangerous to bring it near the fire or gas. The inside of the rooms may be papered, and on the walls little pictures may be pasted. The illustrated catalogues from furniture shops can often be cut up, and the diagrams of doors, etc., cut out and pasted on the doors of your house. Figure 112 shows a sitting-room and a little shop or kitchen. In the latter the counter and dresser are made of matchboxes. The shelves are of strips of cardboard with uprights of cane, wire, or knitting-needles. The fireplace in the sitting-room can be made of a lid of a cardboard box stitched to the wall, and in it another box (a matchbox, for instance) can be set to make the grate. A good table can be made as in Figure 114, which is made by using a lid of a small box, and to the inside of its corners glueing the legs, and then the larger top of thick cardboard can be fixed on with mucilage. The little shields for the corks of bottles, made of pleated lead foil, make very pretty pots and kitchen vessels in such little houses. Rugs can be woven of wool and string, and cushions, etc., to furnish the place. But there is no end to the things a child can make for a doll's house if imagination is encouraged to work the hands.

Other "Community Toys" can be made—railway stations, signals, and signal-boxes are very popular; a market place with its little tented stalls is charming. The houses we see in pictures of foreign lands give great interest, and many are so easy to make that it is quite possible to illustrate the history of home building by means of a series of toy houses. The darker side of life has even invaded our nurseries, and they too have shown the games of the trench and the guns: and it will be good to plan in our playwork now for the rebuilding of the world in the ways of peace, for it is these children of ours who must lead the world back or forward, for better or for worse. All the world is in their hands, though the hands may not yet be strong for more than the making of toys. We older children do but play other games with more serious intent, yet all the same the difference between the game and the business is but a difference of degree.

THE END