It may seem an impeachment of the taste of our readers to have lingered so long on the lesser lights of games and fortune-telling as “Home Amusements,” when we have before us the great world of decorative art: Æsthetic embroidery, dinner-card designing, china painting, the making of screens, and the thousand and one devices by which the modern family can amuse itself.

The making of screens is an amusement which occupies the whole family most profitably for a rainy day, even if it is to be only the cutting out of pictures from the illustrated newspapers, and the subsequent arrangement of them in curious conjunction on a white cotton or muslin background. The use of screens has dawned upon the American mind within a few years. They are delightful in a dining-room to keep off a draught or to hide a closet-door. They break up a too long room admirably. They are very useful in a bedroom to shut off the washstand and bath; and they are very comforting to the invalid, as a protection to his easy-chair against insidious breezes.

Of course, those of satin or linen, embroidered by a skillful hand; those painted on canvas by the best painters of to-day; those from China and Japan—are the screens of the opulent. Very pretty paper screens may be bought at the shops for three or four dollars. But those on which a group of pictures are to be pasted are the cheapest and most amusing of any. And do not go and buy highly-glazed pictures for the purpose. If you do, the screen looks like a valentine. But cut out the pictures from old copies of the “London Illustrated News,” “Punch,” “Harper’s Weekly,” “Harper’s Bazaar,” and the English “Graphic,” paste them thickly one upon another, and you have a curious and most interesting mosaic. A lady in 1876, the Centennial year, made a very beautiful screen of fashion plates from the ordinary magazines of the period. Already (1881) these fashions look very antiquated, and the screen is becoming historically valuable. The effect of these delicately-colored pictures, put on as thickly as possible over the white muslin, has an effect like a festal procession, and is very pretty.

The medium used for adhering the pictures is common flour paste, the pictures being also washed over the outside with the same, and all the edges effectually fastened down, the cotton cloth to which they are applied being tightly stretched over a wooden frame. When domestic paste is made, the material is frequently injured by scorching, or by the addition of too much water. Good paste, when spread on paper, will not strike through it like water, but will remain on the surface, like butter on a piece of bread. To make paste of a superior quality, that will not spoil when kept in a cool place for several months, it is necessary to add dissolved alum as a preservative. When a few quarts are required, dissolve a dessert-spoonful of alum in two quarts of tepid water. Put the water in a tin pail that will hold six or eight quarts, as the flour of which the paste is made will expand greatly while it is boiling. As soon as the tepid water has cooled, stir in good rye or wheat flour, until the liquid has the consistency of cream. See that every lump of flour is crushed before placing the vessel over the fire. To prevent scorching the paste, place over the fire a dish-kettle or wash-boiler, partly filled with water, and set the tin pail containing the material for paste in the water, permitting the bottom to rest on a few large nails or pebbles, to prevent excessive heat. Now add a teaspoonful of powdered resin, a few cloves to flavor the paste, and let it cook until the paste has become as thick as “Graham mush,” when it will be ready for use. Keep it in a tight jar, and it will last for a long time. If too thick, add cold water, and stir it thoroughly. Such paste will hold almost as well as glue.

The famous picture-books of Walter Crane make a very pretty frieze for screens; the artists of the family sometimes paint a frieze. In these days of dadoes the screens are often made with dado, wainscot, and frieze in three different colored papers, so that there are three tiers of background for the pictures, if the maker desires to leave spaces between them. The cutting out of the pictures is an amusing occupation for all the family on a rainy day.

This making of screens sometimes leads to another very attractive work for a rainy day—the preparation for a fancy dress ball. This, in a lonely country house, far away from the chance of any outward amusement, has often cheated a fortnight’s bad weather of its heart-depressing qualities.

As we have not the stores of old armor, old brocade and satin, powdered wigs, and costumes of the different reigns, which may be supposed from modern English novels to be the property of every English mansion, we must call upon taste and upon our national faculty of invention to help us in this dilemma. The country store will give us black and white tarlatan, chintz, cotton flannel (a most excellent medium), and, indeed, flannels of all sorts. Black lace, jewelry, and flowers are in every lady’s trunk, and, with some stiff linings and appliquÉ chintz flowers, an old silk can be made into a priceless brocade.

Let us take a Venetian dress first. We will have King Pantelon, the Lord of Misrule, in black with scarlet shirt and three-cornered hat, and attended by his gay and dissolute crew. We will have the Illustrissimi, wearing the dress of the ancient Venetian nobility, scarlet cloaks, and long bag wigs, mightily disdainful; the Chiozotti in black velvet, wide lace collars, and high cloth caps, adorned with artificial flowers—they shall shower confetti and make jokes; we shall have dominoes and masks, Egyptians and Neapolitans in velvet, with scarlet caps and stockings, clapping castanets; we shall have Armenians, Levant merchants and sailors, Turks in caftans, Greeks and Dalmatians, regular-featured Mussulmans, Hindoos with jet-black hair, and Malay Lascars in many-colored turbans, fez, and scarf; grinning soot-black negroes, Polish Jews in furred caps and long coats, Magyars in Hessians and pelisses; Bohemian nurses in Czechen costume, a colored handkerchief in the hair; dark-eyed young bourgeoises in coquettish black veils; elegant ladies in velvet and point lace; the gondolier, in his picturesque sailor costume and broad sash; the Finland peasant, with short skirts, long-dangling ear-rings, and silver pins; the Maltese with her fazzoletto; an old Contadino, with short velveteen knee-breeches, gaiters, and colored cotton umbrella; priests all in black gown, shovel hat, and black silk stockings; dashing naval officers; the Guardia Nazionale, and weather-beaten fishermen with bronzed faces and red Phrygian cap. We shall have Lord Byron, pale and melancholy, and picturesque Masaniello; the patriarchs of the Greek Church; the Spanish beauties, the Swiss peasant, the German MÄdchen; the madcap Harlequin dress of a Spanish princess. Then there will be all the seasons—winter, for instance, in tulle, swansdown, and spun glass; the Marie Antoinettes, in pink brocade with long, square trains and trimmings of Marabout feathers; the lovely Georgian costume, a Seville gypsy, a Russian peasant; a flower-girl, a Nymph; Night and Day; Spanish students and Flemish boors; Pages of Queen Blanche of Castile; the beautiful white uniform of the Dragon de Villars; a gothic costume; Charlemagne and his Paladins. In short—“the Carnival of Venice.” All this was done, and well done, at a country house and the adjacent village (a village of not more than fifteen hundred inhabitants), and for very little money, only a few years ago.

The business is done if one only thinks he can do it; and there are numbers enough to work at it. A boarding-school holiday, a watering-place, a large town bent on “getting up something” for charity, should have one such home behind it, where a natural-born leader will set the whole thing going, and the picturesque shores of Italy will give up their delights to some western town, some inland village, some quiet and decorous hamlet of New England, where all the inhabitants are dying of ennui.

But here, from the pictures of our screen, which have suggested all this, we have been led off from Decorative Art into the business of giving a ball! We have been entertaining a motley crowd indeed!

But see! how we have cheated the clouds! The rainy fortnight has been the most dissipated season possible—all owing to our happy device of getting up a fancy ball—one of the very many pleasant thoughts which have grown out of screens and screen-making.