Part 7 (2/2)
Therefore if you are going to build a city that is to go on, you must collect the materials of your own, and the odds and ends that amiable workmen will readily give you will take a useful place in your collection. If you let it be known that you want odds and ends of pretty and simple shapes, your friends will save them for you, and you will gradually ama.s.s the things you need. I know well enough that there will have to be a place to keep them, but the toy-cupboard, if you clear out all the toys you never play with, will hold a good deal, and many of the things you collect will do for other purposes as well as for the building of cities.
CHAPTER VI
Collections
[Ill.u.s.tration: TREES.]
FIRST in your building collection will be the boxes, arches, and steps of which I have spoken. Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you probably have. Odd chessmen--quite beautiful ones can often be bought for a few pence--are very valuable for our purpose. The black and red halma men are very useful too, but the yellow and green always look cheap and nasty. Card counters are useful, and so is silver paper. Gla.s.s drops off old chandeliers are good for fountains, and pieces of green cloth for gra.s.s plots. The back of green wall-paper does for this, too; and very realistic gra.s.s lawns can be made by chopping up the long green gra.s.s that people sell for fire screens. It is really sedge finely split up, and dyed. You cut it up as finely as you can with scissors, and when you have about a teacupful you take a square of stiff cardboard and cover it all over with glue; then quickly, before the glue has time to cool, you sprinkle your chopped gra.s.s thickly all over it and leave it to dry.
Next day, _not before_, spread a newspaper and turn the cardboard over so that the loose gra.s.s falls away on to the paper. Fasten down your gra.s.s plot in a suitable place in your city and build a little red brick wall round it with a little arched gateway, and you will have a neat and charming enclosed garden. For garden beds dark-coloured tobacco makes good mould, and shows up your little rose-trees. You can make standard rose-trees of loofah--dyed green, and the stalks of long matches painted brown. The roses, which are stuck on with glue, are red or white immortelles, and the whole effect is just what you are trying for. Large trees can be made of sprigs of box or veronica, with immortelles glued on, and they will last fresh and pretty about a week. Palm trees can be made of elder stems and larch or of the sedge gra.s.s.
Lay the gra.s.s evenly and, beginning about half-way down, wind brown wool or silk thread round and round closely and, very like splicing a cricket bat, work downwards towards the thick part of the gra.s.s stalk. Fasten the end very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton reel or a lead piping pot, cut off, evenly, the loose ends of the gra.s.s, fold them back level, cut the stem.
For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood, lavender, thyme, or marjoram make charming little trees.
Sh.e.l.ls are extremely useful for decoration and produce the effect of carving. Almost all sh.e.l.ls will be useful in one way or another, but I have found the most satisfaction in the gray and pearly sh.e.l.ls which you find among the thick seaweed ridges on the beach below the grey cliffs of Cornwall, and the little yellow periwinkly sh.e.l.ls that lie on the rocks below the white cliffs of Kent. If you glue these sh.e.l.ls strongly on arches and pillars you will find them very handsome adornments.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THICK ARCHES.]
Keep your sh.e.l.ls in boxes. There are always plenty of boxes in the world, and if not boxes, little bags will do to hold the different kinds of sh.e.l.ls. It is well worth while to keep the different kinds separate.
The work of sorting out the sh.e.l.ls is very damping to the eager enthusiast anxious to execute a decorative design. Indeed, it is well to keep all your building materials sorted each according to its kind, the wooden things together and the metal things and, above all, the crockery things. Keep the Noah's Ark animals in their Ark, and the bricks in their boxes, and when you are going to build don't get everything out at once and make a rubbish heap of it on the floor.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FAN WINDOW.]
As you grow more accustomed to building, you will find that sometimes you build a temple or palace that charms you so much that you wish to build it again; and you will soon learn what are the materials needed, and just take out those and a few more from your store. I say a few more, because you will never build your temple or your palace twice _exactly_ the same: you are sure to think of some improvement, however small.
I have made beautiful windows with the sticks of an old ivory fan, framed in dark wood bricks, and ornamented the dark wall above with elephant tusk sh.e.l.ls and others, and below with carved ivory card counters.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE.]
There is a certain Elephant Temple which I have built many times. Its floor is a red and white chessboard, and its roof is supported on a double row of white pillars. White pillars surround the altar--a wooden box--on which the ebony elephant stands. On each side of him are red fairy lights, hidden by b.u.t.tresses from the human eye which peeps through the brazen gates into that shadowy interior, and falling full on the elephant on his pillared shrine. The walls are of big red books--_Sheridan's Plays_, _Tom Jones_, and Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.
The roof is a flat square lid, once the lid of a packing case, stained a dark brown like the bricks. On the side are the windows made of the ivory fan, and the dark bricks and the elephant tusk sh.e.l.ls. There is a door, too, a mother-of-pearl one; in a former life it was the card-case of a much-loved aunt, who n.o.bly contributed it to the Temple. Above this door is a white animal from the Noah's Ark.
And all the rest of that wall is built up of dark-stained brown wooden bricks. The other side shows between dark b.u.t.tresses the red of the books, and towards the back of this side are small square buildings--wooden boxes stained brown--with bra.s.s domes and mysterious doorways. I think the priests and attendants of the Temple live here.
The front of the Temple shows a little of the red between dark b.u.t.tresses, which, here, are ornamented with delicate dark carved chessmen. The gate is of pierced bra.s.s--two finger-plates for a door, and the brazen pillars of the portico are two candlesticks, which support a bra.s.s inkstand, on which stand two yellowish wooden chessmen.
On the middle of the roof is a big lacquered wooden bowl--the kind that nice grocers put in their windows full of prunes or coffee. Above is a bra.s.s rose-bowl, on that a finger-bowl of inlaid bra.s.s, crowned with a black chess king. There are two dark arches with bed-k.n.o.bs on them, and round the roof are various towers and turrets, and tall minarets made of dark bricks with chessmen on the top.
In front of the pillars at the gate two black elephants stand on wooden plinths, and the fore-court of the Temple and the s.p.a.ce at the side are paved with mother-of-pearl.
I know the main things that are needed for this Temple, but its details are changed a little every time I build it.
If you cannot get mother-of-pearl card counters you can make a beautiful pavement by pasting the s.h.i.+ning pods of honesty in a pattern on a piece of dark brown cardboard, or dark brown paper pasted on cardboard; but if you do this you must build a little dark-wood brick wall all round to hide the brown paper edges. Build gatehouses in your wall, little ones, to show off, by contrast, the ma.s.sive splendour of your Temple. These honesty pods are a most useful subst.i.tute for mother-of-pearl. You can paste them on square pillars or on the fronts of boxes (houses I mean) or make sloping roofs of them by sticking them on folded cardboard fastened at the proper angle by tapes glued about a third of the way up.
But as a rule sloping roofs are not good in Eastern cities. A gra.s.s garden with paths of honesty, or a sh.e.l.l-built fountain basin in the middle, will add a charm to any city square. And by the way, don't be afraid of open s.p.a.ces. Have as many buildings as you like, and ma.s.s them together as you choose, but let there be open s.p.a.ces. They will be to your building as mounts are to pictures or margins to books. And for frame or binding, let there be a wall all round your city. It gives a neatness and a completeness which enhance a hundred-fold all the qualities your city may possess.
[Ill.u.s.tration: HONESTY ROOF.]
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