It makes an exceedingly unique bag, and will hold all the marbles a boy can win, and besides winning marbles he will win the envy of every other boy who sees his fine, new marble bag.
Every boy needs a pencil box. Plain little oblong boxes most of them, with a flat hinged cover, and a little lock that you keep carefully fastened with the key. That is, a boy locks his pencil box when he is able to find the key, but whether it was in his pocket, or fastened to his watch chain, the school-box key always does manage to get away, somewhere--to make its escape.
One day, however, the boy sees displayed in the window of a stationery shop, a new sort of pencil box, a most fascinating kind. The cover of the box is made of narrow strips of wood fastened side by side like the strips in the top of a roll-top desk, and when the shopman opens the pencil box to show the boy the inside, the cover just _slides_ right back out of sight, while the boy looks on in open-eyed astonishment. The shopman’s supply of these magic boxes is limited, though, and there is a wild scramble for their possession among the boys who can produce ten cents--for that is the exorbitant price charged by the shopman. The boy wants one of those magic boxes. His fingers just tingle and burn to hold one and try to make the cover slide in its charming way, but he has only five cents, he can’t buy one.
The boy will be able to make his own pencil box, though, and this is the way he must go about it in order to construct one of those fascinating, roll-top ones, just like the one in the shop window.
In the first place, a boy must know how to whittle. All that he needs in the way of material is a jack-knife, some pieces of wood three-sixteenths of an inch thick, some more pieces an eighth thick, a strip of white cloth, and some little three-eighth inch nails.
The first piece to make (Fig. 1) is the side of the box. It is just a plain oblong of the three-sixteenth inch wood, measuring nine inches long by two and a quarter inches wide. All the pieces are made three-sixteenths thick except the strips for the cover. Two of these sides are necessary of course.
Next come two strips nine inches long and a quarter of an inch wide which are fastened, notched side up on the inside of each side, “flush”--even--that is, with the top, with four little nails driven from the outside. The piece which is cut from the end of each of these, as shown in the drawing, is to make a joint which is later to be fitted with Fig. 10.