In the four corners of the table bore, with a gimlet, through the canvas, some holes that are just the right size to hold dowel sticks, five inches long. You can buy these dowel sticks of a carpenter in foot lengths at a few cents each. Glue the posts in the holes which you have bored in the table and also bore extra holes for two more about a foot apart in the front of the table. These last little posts are for the gate to your circus ground. When the glue has set and the posts are perfectly dry, tie cord to one, near the top, and then stretch it to another, knotting it, until you have finished the rope fence that encloses the circus ground. If you like you can have two or three rows of cord, and you can print a little circus sign to pin to the gate. It may read:
Clowns, Wild Beasts, and the Biggest Elephant in the World.
Performances Every Afternoon and Evening.
Admission, Adults, two pins, Children, alone, one pin.
All around the edges of the bill you can draw pictures of wild animals with your colored pencils.
The circus ground will look very much pleasanter if you have a few trees standing about on the edges, and these trees will be useful, also, to tie some of your wild beasts to.
Meat skewers will do nicely for the tree trunks if you fringe ever so many narrow, doubled strips of green tissue paper, and wind them with it, fastening the fringes to the meat skewer with mucilage. The green paper flutters in the air quite like real foliage in the breeze on circus day, and the little trees will stand up nicely if you stick the end of each skewer inside an empty spool, glueing it there so that it will stay in place.
Did you think that you were never coming to the tent for your circus? Well, here it is, and the picture shows you just how to construct it. You will need to enlarge the diagram several times the size which you see in the picture, but that is easily accomplished by means of your ruler and lead pencil. Use some sort of tough, firm paper for the tent. Water color paper will be splendid because you can get out your paint box and paint pictures of wild men and palm trees and animals on the sides. If you have no water color paper, use brown bristol board. The latter makes a fine stiff tent. Cut out the top and sides as carefully as you can, bend them, and glue or paste them together. Then stand the tent up in the center of your circus ground.