"Trot her out," implored James.

"It's picture books."

A distinct sniff went over the assembly, only kept in check by a desire to be polite.

"There can't be anything awfully new about picture books," said Tom.

"Especially cloth picture books. You and Helen have been cutting out cambric for cloth picture books," accused Ethel Brown.

"Della has been making some variations, though." Helen came to Della's rescue. "She's made some with the leaves all one color, pink or blue; and here's another one with a variety—two pages light pink, and the next two pages pale green."

Ethel Brown cast a more interested eye toward the picture book display.

"How do you sew them together?" she asked.

"You can do it on the machine and let it go at that. In fact, that's the best plan even if you go on to add some decoration of feather-stitching or cat-stitching. The machine stitching makes it firmer."

"Is there an interlining?"

"I tried them with and without an interlining. I don't think an interlining is necessary. The two thicknesses of cambric are all you need."

"Dicky has a cloth book with just one thickness for each page," said Ethel Brown.

"But that's made of very heavy cotton," explained Helen.

"You cut your cambric like a sheet of note-paper," said Della.

"Haven't my lessons on scientific management soaked in better than that?" demanded Roger. "If you want to save time you cut just as many sheets of note-paper, so to speak, as your scissors will go through."

"Certainly," retorted Della with dignity. "I took it for granted that the members of the U. S. C. had learned that. Put two sheets of this cambric note-paper together flat and stitch them. That makes four pages to paste on, you see. You can make your book any size you want to and have just as many pages as you need to tell your story on."

"Story? What story?" asked Ethel Blue, interestedly.

"Aha! I thought you'd wake up!" laughed Della. "Here, my children, is where my book differs from most of the cloth picture books that you ever saw. My books aren't careless collections of pictures, with no relation to each other. Here's a cat book, for instance. Not just every-day cats, though I've put in lots of cats and some kodaks of my own cat. There are pictures of the big cats—lions and tigers—and I've put in some scenery so that the child who gets this book will have an idea of what sort of country the beasts really live in."

"It's a natural history book," declared James.

"Partly. But it winds up with 'The True Story of Thomas's Nine Lives.'"

"The kid it is going to won't know English," objected Roger.

"Oh, I haven't written it out. It's just told in pictures with 1, 2, 3, through 9 at the head of each page. They'll understand."

"Do you see what an opportunity the different colored cambric gives?" said Helen. "Sometimes Della uses colored pictures or she paints them, and then she makes the background harmonize with the coloring of the figures."

"Why couldn't you make a whole book of my silhouettes?" demanded Ethel Brown.

"Bully!" commended James.

"You can work out all sorts of topics in these books, you see," Della went on. "There are all the fairy stories to illustrate and 'Red Riding Hood,' and the 'Bears,' and when you get tired of making those you can have one about 'The Wonders of America,' and put in Niagara."

"And the Rocky Mountains," said Tom.

"And the Woolworth Building," suggested Ethel Brown.

"And a cotton field with the negroes picking cotton," added Ethel Blue.

"There wouldn't be any trouble getting material for that one," said Helen.

"Nor for one on any American city. I've got one started that is going to show New York from the statue of Liberty to the Jumel Mansion and the Van Cortland House, with a lot of other historical buildings and skyscrapers and museums in between."

"We'll be promoting emigration from the old country after the war is over if we show the youngsters all the attractions that Uncle Sam has to offer."

"There'll be a lot of them come over anyway so they might as well learn what they'll see when they arrive."

"I see heaps of opportunities in that idea," said Roger. "There's a chance to teach the kiddies something by these books if we're careful to be truthful in the pictures we put in."

"Not to make monkeys swinging down the forests of Broadway, eh?" laughed Tom.

"If I'm to do a million or two of these you'll all have to help me get the pictures together," begged James.

"I've brought some with me you can have for a starter," said Della, "and I'm collecting others and keeping them in separate envelopes—animals in one and buildings in another and so on. It will make it easier for you."

"Muchas gracias, SeÑorita," bowed James, who was just beginning Spanish and liked to air a "Thank you" occasionally.

"I know what I'm going to make for some member of my family," declared Roger.

"Name it, it will be such a surprise when it comes."

"Probably it will go to Grandmother Emerson so I don't mind telling you that I think I'll write a history of our summer at Chautauqua and illustrate it."

"That's the best notion that ever came from Roger," approved James. "I think I'll make one and give it to Father. The Recognition Day procession and all that, you know."

"Envelopes make me think that we may have some small gifts—cards or handkerchiefs—that we can send in envelopes," said Ethel Blue, "and we ought to decorate them just as much as our boxes."

"They won't be hard. Any of the ideas we've suggested for the boxes will do—flowers and silhouettes, and seals. You're a smarty with watercolors so you can paint some original figures or a tiny landscape, but the rest of us will have to keep to the pastepot," laughed Margaret.

"For home gifts we can write rhymes to put into the envelopes, but I suppose it wouldn't do for these European kids," said Tom. "We don't know where they're going, you see, and it would never do if an English child got a German rhyme or the other way round."

"O-oh, ne-ver," gasped Ethel Blue whose quick imagination sympathized with the feelings of a child to whom such a thing happened. "We'll have to make them understand through their eyes."

"Fortunately Santa Claus with his pack speaks a language they can all understand," nodded Roger.

"Here comes his humble servant right now," exclaimed Mrs. Hancock at the door.

Tom ran to hold it open for her, and Roger relieved her of the waiter which she was carrying.

"James has to have an egg-nog at this time," she explained, "so I thought all of you might like to be 'picked up' after your hard afternoon's work."

These sentiments were greeted with applause though Tom insisted that the best part of the afternoon was yet to come as he had not yet had a chance to tell about his invention.

"One that you'll appreciate tremendously, Mrs. Hancock," he said gravely. "All housekeepers will. You must get Margaret to make you one."

"Don't tell her what it is and I can give it to her for Christmas," cried Margaret.

James's egg-nog and his wafers were placed on the table beside him. The others sat at small tables, of which there were several around the room, and drank their egg-nog and ate their cakes with great satisfaction.

"Tell me how this egg-nog is made," begged Helen. "It is delicious and I'm sure Mother would like to know."

"Mother always has it made the same way," replied Margaret. "I'm sure it is concocted out of six eggs and half a pound of sugar, and three pints of whipped cream and a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg."

"It's so foamy—that isn't the whipped cream alone."

"First you beat the yolks of the eggs and the sugar together until it is all frothy. Then you beat the whites of the eggs by themselves until they are stiff and you stir that in gently. Then you put the spice on top of that and lastly you heap the whipped cream on top of the whole thing."

"It's perfectly delicious," exclaimed Dorothy, "and so is the fruit cake."

"Mother prides herself on her fruit cake. It is good, isn't it? She's going to let me make some to send to the orphans."

"Won't that be great. Baked in ducky little pans like these."

"They'll keep perfectly, of course."

"Would your mother let us have the receipt now so we could be practicing it to make some too?" asked Dorothy.

"I'm sure she'd be delighted," and Margaret ran off to get her mother's manuscript cook book from which Dorothy copied the following receipt:

"Sift the flour, soda and spices together. Beat the eggs, add the milk to them. Cream the butter, add the sugar gradually, add the molasses, the milk and egg, then the flour gradually. Mix the fruit, sift a little flour over it, rub it in the flour, add to it the mixture. Add the extract. Stir and beat well. Fill greased pans two-thirds full. Bake in a moderately hot oven one and a quarter hours if in a loaf. In small sizes bake slowly twenty to thirty minutes."

"I'm ready to hear what Tom's got to offer," said James, leaning back luxuriously in his chair after the remains of the feast had been taken away.

"Mine is a paper-cutting scheme," responded Tom. "Perhaps it won't come easy to everybody, but on a small scale I'm something of a paper cutter myself."

"Dull edged?" queried Roger.

"Hm," acknowledged Tom. "I can't illustrate 'Cinderella' like the man Della saw, but I can cut simple figures and I want to propose one arrangement of them to this august body."

"Fire ahead," came Roger's permission.

"It's just a variation of the strings of paper dolls that I used to make for Della when she was a year or two younger than she is now."

Della received this taunt with a puckered face.

"You fold strips of white paper—or blue or yellow or any old color—in halves and then in halves again and then again, until it is about three inches wide. Then you cut one figure of a little girl, letting the tips of the hands and skirts remain uncut. When you unfold the strip you have a string of cutey little girls joining hands. See?"

They all laughed for all of them had cut just such figures when they were children.

"Now my application of this simple device," went on Tom in the solemn tones of a professor, "is to make them serve as lamp shades."

"For the orphans?" laughed Roger.

"For the orphans I'm going to cut about a bushel of strips of all colors. Children always like to play with them just so."

"I don't see why those of us who can't draw couldn't cut a child or a dog or some figure from a magazine and lay it on the folded paper and trace around the edges and then cut it," suggested Dorothy.

"You could perfectly well. All you have to remember is to leave a folded edge at the side, top and bottom. You can make a row of dogs standing on their hind paws and holding hands—forepaws—and the ground they are standing on will fasten them together at the bottom."

"How does the lamp shade idea work out?" asked Helen with Grandfather Emerson's Christmas gift in mind.

"You cut a string of figures that are fairly straight up and down, like Greek maidens or some conventional vases or a dance of clowns. Then you must be sure that your strip is long enough to go around your shade. Then you line it with asbestos paper—the kind that comes in a sort of book for the kitchen."

"I see. You paste the strip right on to the asbestos paper and cut out the figures," guessed James.

"Exactly," replied Tom. "After which you paste the ends of the strip together and there you have your shade ready to slip on to the glass."

"What keeps it from falling down and off?"

"The shape of the shade usually holds it up. If it isn't the right shape, though, you can run a cord through your figures' hands and tighten them up as much as you need to."

"I think that's a rather jolly stunt of Tom's," commended Roger patronizingly. Tom gave him a kick under the table and James growled a request not to hit his game leg.

"If you boys are beginning to quarrel it's time we adjourned," decided the president. "Has anybody any more ideas to get off her alleged mind this afternoon?"

"I thought of picture frames," offered James.

"While my hand is in with pasting I believe I'll make some frames—a solid pasteboard back and the front with an oval or an oblong or a square cut out of it. You paste the front on to the back at the edges except at the bottom. You leave that open to put the picture in."

"You can cover that with chintz—cotton, cotton, cotton," chanted Dorothy, who seldom missed a chance to promote the cotton crusade.

"How do you hang it up?" asked Margaret.

"Stick on a little brass ring with a bit of tape. Or you can make it stand by putting a stiff bit of cardboard behind it with a tape hinge."

"That would be a good home present," said Ethel Brown.

"Perfectly good for family photographs. You can make them hold two or three. But you can fix them up for the European kids and put in any sort of picture—a dog or a cat or George Washington or some really beautiful picture."

"I believe in giving them pictures of America or American objects or places or people," said Dorothy.

"Dorothy is the champion patriot of the United Service Club," laughed Roger. "Come on, infants; we must let James rest or Mrs. Hancock won't invite us to come again. I wish you could get over to Rosemont for the movies next week," he added.

"What movies?"

"The churches have clubbed together and hired the school hall and they're going to get the latest moving pictures from the war zone that they can find. It is the first time Rosemont has ever had the real thing."