HANGING CRADLE.

During the warm days it is a good plan to have the baby sleep out of doors, if possible, and for this purpose the hanging cradles, which can be used in the nursery and bedroom, are equally serviceable when hung from the limb of a tree outdoors.

These cradles are only intended for young babies who are not strong enough to raise themselves and fall from their nest.

Olga Oliver, in one of the numbers of Babyhood, describes one of these cradles as follows:

This little home-made contrivance is both simple and inexpensive. The materials used are strips of wood, a hook, wire spring, and ticking or other strong cloth.

The hook, which must be a strong one, is securely fastened in the ceiling, and from this the cradle hangs. I have found it convenient to have several hooks in different rooms. By this means the cradle may be hung wherever my work calls me.

I can keep a watch on the little sleeper, and sometimes prolong the nap by a light touch upon the cradle. A hook may be so placed that at night baby can occupy the cradle, and yet be within reach of the mother.

The frame is thirty-six inches long, inside measure. The end pieces are twenty inches long, inside measure. The wood is one inch by one and one half. The straps, which connect the frame with the spring, are forty-four inches at one end of the cradle and forty-two at the other, and one inch wide. The spring is twelve inches long and two inches in diameter. Iron strips should be tacked on the corners of the wooden frame to strengthen it.

Three yards of ticking are required to make the bottom of the bed, which must be shaped and tacked to the frame.

The straps, first passing them through a ring which fastens to the spring, must now be tacked to the four corners of the frame. Add to this two light pillows, one square and the other oblong, and a light woollen spread, and the cradle will be ready for its occupant.

I have described the cradle as my own is made, but of course the beauty of it-and it is a very graceful little affair-may be added to, to suit the taste and purse of the individual. The frame, which is covered with the striped ticking, may be also covered with a roll of plush, and a valance of the same be tacked along the outer edge of the frame. If this is done the straps should also be covered with a band of plush.

For protection from flies a strip of mosquitonetting five yards long may be gathered along one selvedge, and fastened just below the spring, in which it falls in loose folds to the frame.

The entire cost of the cradle, not including pillows and spread, was but a trifle over a dollar.

Chimney covers are tiny protectors to keep the dust from getting in the chimney of the lamp during the day, and thus dimming its clearness. The prettiest are made in the form of a little Turkish turban, using a large pill box as the foundation of the headpiece and twisting about it a half square of red silk, fastening a little buckle, or finely cut steel button, at one side. The point of the half-square turns over the top of the box to represent a head piece. Another pretty chimney cover is a scarlet poppy made of four red petals of satin, delicately tinted with a brush or with a needle and silk at their base, to make the darker shades necesA stem of green silk covered wire is added which serves as a handle to lift the cup-like flower from the chimney.

sarv.

SPIDER WEB NEEDLE WORK.

Have the goods double, mark squares with pencil and rule, as wide as you want them. Now cut each way from the middle of each square, and double the corners in between the goods; button-hole stitch all around, then overcast, button-hole, and overcast, until the hole is filled.

Painting on chamois leather is a style of decoration which is still used for dress trimmings, and for various household ornamentations. The natural ecru color of the leather is sometimes preserved, though quite often the leather is stained to a different color. A design in dark yellows, shading into the natural color of the chamois, is probably as effective as anything else. Small pieces of this work have been in use for some time, but large hangings are now made decorated in the bold, effective way which gives the best result in this material. Quaint belts, with long, hanging ends, designed from old peasant costumes, are decorated in this way.

A little woman with more ingenuity than cash devised a covering for some worn chairs which has been much admired, and justly so, as it is exceedingly pretty. The frames, which had been a long time in her family, were of handsome carved ebony, and for this reason the ordinary way of resorting to creton or enveloping furniture linen was not to be considered. A tour of the shops revealed the white cotton Bedford cord used for art embroidery, which, while artistic, is a cheap material. On a square of this fabric large enough to cover the seat of a chair she had stamped a bow-knot tying a cluster of corn flowers. The bow-knot she outlined in blue rope linen with touches of black, and the flowers she worked partly in outline and partly in solid embroidery in different shades of dull blue. When these covers were tacked securely and the edges covered with blue gimp they presented a really elegant appear

ance.

VOL. VI.

No. 6.

NE may write of scenes and incidents

ONE

far away and long ago, in the first person, without individual responsibility for the history or the fiction, as the license always conceded poetry may be sometimes permitted prose.

There was a farm sloping westward gently from a curved line of low hills into one of the sunny and blooming valleys of Ohio. The farmhouse was under the protection of a grove, the sycamore and locust, cherry and cedar standing guard together. A short path led from the front door to a spring deep and cool, sheltered by slabs of limestone and shaded by a stately elm and two graceful maples.

The ridge, whose shortening shadows told of the rising sun, was timber land, rich in ash, walnut, hickory, oak, and poplar, with occasional beeches and blue gums and groups of sugar trees. Many fox and crow grapevines entwined the trunks and hung heavily over the boughs, making in the autumnal days marvellous displays of fruitfulness. Here and there the persimmon and the pawpaw flourished and when the frosts were white dropped their succulent treasures, yellow as gold and luscious as the figs of Damascus, on the scarlet carpet of fallen leaves; and there was in ample array the honey locust, the mulberry and wild cherry and hawthorn, the black and the dew berry, and piercing the delicate mosses and grasses were the stalks of the ginseng and the May apple. The woods were full of life and beauty, and provision for the turkey, the coon, the opossum, and the squirrel; and birds, from the woodpecker and yellowhammer to the pigeon and the dove; while the boys and the pigs were rivals in the consumption of the good things bounteously spread before them. The bosom

of the valley was laced with a thread of silver; a stream-the home of sunfishmurmured and sparkled under lofty sycamores, statuesque, their arms white as marble, and lowly willows that drooped along the shining water like slender rods of gold. The hillside fields were beautiful with wheat alternating with barley, rye, and oats, and declined easily to levels where the corn grew tall. The springs at the foot of the hills could be traced, like veins in a leaf, in little brooks. to the larger one in the centre, that, brightening with their increase, babbled over the polished gravel and glistening sand, southward to the great Miami and the greater and splendid Ohio.

It was a

My first pet was a squirrel. mere baby when the home of its parents was broken up by the fall of a tree, and it became a captive and won the heart of its young master. Ah, this was nearly sixty years ago, away in the thirties, when General Andrew Jackson was president, and the hickory trees were adored as his emblem and standard. It was the duty of a democratic boy to believe that the general lived on hickory nuts in the Creek war, and they were good enough-as indeed they were-for anyone to eat, and sanctified, as the food that heaven sent in the wilderness, to the hero of the day and the age, who had beaten the British at New Orleans, and because he was brave and good had been persecuted by the wicked, who also had slandered his poor dear wife, the "Aunt Rachel" of the people who hated the redcoats and the Whigs and Tories, until, heart-broken, she died. Through the recollections of generations I can see the bright eyes of my squirrel, his slender figure and nimble movements, the fine pose with which he held a nut in

his paws and curled his glossy tail. He could cut with his keen teeth the shells of nuts, but preferred that I should crack them. He had the goodness to sit on my shoulder and scamper with silky softness over my head. He consented to be concealed in the bosom of my jacket and put out his saucy head when a button was unfastened for his convenience. He slept in a box on leaves that I gathered, and skipped about the house silent as a shadow. I. was deeply concerned about his relations with Thomas, my favorite cat, who eyed him at times with an expression of inquiry, as to whether after all this singular companion might not be a rat, masquerading with a flaunting tail of incredible proportions. But Thomas, while he maintained a reserve that I feared was sinister, lapped the milk with which he was bribed and ate the birds of his own catching-when he did not lay them as an offering before me-without flagrant hostility to the agile creature that shared my caresses with himself, and was to him a mystery, if not a rival. Alas! I did not long have a divided duty and affection in parcelling out devotion between the members of my happy family. My squirrel invaded the kitchen, where a formidable girl was the severe authority, and she said he got into mischief, and as she cast him forth rudely-oh, how cruel she was! the skin from his tail with all its feathery fur remained in her rough fingers, leaving him like a rat indeed, and he was put to death because he had lost his distinguishing decoration. The naughty girl who had caused the calamity was not sorry, as she should have been, and had the hardness of heart to broil the delicate morsel for breakfast-but not for me. I could not eat my friend, though I remember his fine flavor when over the fire. Thomas lived long and prospered. He was a mighty hunter, catching quail and bringing them home, taking a saucer of milk in exchange. Once he caused much grief and narrowly escaped capital punishment. There was a nest full of young birds in a cedar that was so nigh the house as to be one of the treasures of our home, and the mother and father birds joyously fed their little ones with the choicest insects. Thomas was among the spectators of the family festival, and while I thought, from the study he made. of the situation, that he had something

on his mind, I felt he was a baffled rascal, for the branches of the tree were impenetrable. But Thomas had a military head and was a strategist. He saw that a taller tree commanded the populous nest, and climbing it sailed down upon the birds, and at one fell swoop destroyed all the little chicks and the mother too, leaving the father of the flock disconsolate to scream around the scene of ruin and death. The conduct of Thomas was admired, but not approved. Unconscious of crime he purred as usual, and never seemed to know that he was the cause of sorrow to those who loved him. ing his sinfulness in devouring the innocent, when winter came I built him a house and gave him a sheepskin with the wool on for a bed. He lived to a good old age, and died after a royal battle with a strange dog.

But notwithstand

When my father's father came from old North Carolina, through the Cumberland Gap and the land of the cane and the blue grass, crossed the Ohio and entered the Miami country, the wilderness was almost unbroken and the big, gaunt, gray wolves howled at night. They had what the musicians call carrying voicessicians call carrying voices-a clear shrillness with a weird vibration, penetrating, threatening, striking the pioneers, homesick for the old plantations on the distant tidal rivers, and jarring them with a chilling dread of something malignant and dangerous in the dark. My grandfather killed a deer and hung it in the smokehouse. There were drops of blood on the ground over which the game had been carried on a pole by two men, and when night came the watchdog-no coward as a rule-barked and whined mournfully, and as the door was opened he, with hair erect, took refuge in the house. Then, very near, in the gloom could be seen the glowing eyes of animals. Grandfather was not to be expelled from his own premises, and made a sally, armed with what he called a spontoon, or a clumsy spear and hatchet with a long handle, and stabbed the foremost of the grim besiegers, which yelped diabolically, but the troop did not give way. Quite the reverse, they advanced, and after a few thrusts and sharp ejaculations it became evident the spontoon was a failure, and the defender of his household fell back into his wooden castle and grasped his musket, which fortunately was well