For this you’ll need an old handkerchief—it’s got to be an old one, that you or your father don’t use any more—some string, and a stone, or some washers.

1. Lay the handkerchief out flat.

2. Now take a piece of string, cut it into four pieces, each about a foot long, and tie one piece around each corner. Twist up each corner and tie a square knot. That’s right over left, left over right.

3. Pull the strings out straight so the corners of the handkerchief

are all together. Now take all four strings and tie a knot about three or four inches up from the bottom.

4. We used to hunt around and find a stone with a kind of dent in the middle, so you could tie the string around tight. But we rarely found a good stone, and it almost always comes loose sooner or later, and then I found a box in the basement that had a lot of heavy washers in it. If you can find washers, it’s better. You put the string through the holes and tie it up tight. If all you’ve got is a stone, tie it the best you can, in all directions.

5. Now take the center of the handkerchief between your thumb and index finger and whirl it around and around, until it’s going good. You can tell it’s going really good when you hear it make a kind of whistling noise. Let go of it when the stone is coming up. The stone will carry it up in the air, then it will start to fall, stone first, the handkerchief will open out like a parachute, and there you are.

Lots of times it will get caught in a tree or on a telephone wire. What do you do then? If you can climb a tree, you climb the tree. If it’s on a telephone wire, you do not climb the telephone pole, because maybe it’s also an electric light pole, and the kind of electricity that runs in those wires is very dangerous. If you threw it in a tree that’s too tall, or if it’s a telephone wire, build another parachute.

Get a big empty tin can, the kind that has a top that comes off all

in one piece, like a coffee can. You will also need a long thin flexible piece of wood, a yardstick works well, a piece of thin wire (if you or someone in your family or one of your friends plays the guitar or the mandolin or the ukulele or the violin, and they’ve got an old music string they don’t need any more, that will do fine), and masking tape or adhesive tape or any strong sticky tape you have.

1. Punch a hole in the top of the can. You can do this by using a nail and a hammer.

2. Tie a knot in one end of your wire, or if it’s too stiff to knot, tie it around a little piece of wood, so that you can thread it through the hole and pull rightly on it, without it coming through the hole.

3. Now take the yardstick and drill a hole in that, too.

4. Take the other end of the yardstick and put it against the side of the can, wind around the can with your tape.

5. Now bend the yardstick like a bow, but just a little ways, and thread the other end of the wire through the hole, and fasten that end of the wire down with tape, or tie a knot in it, any way you like so that the wire keeps the yardstick bent in a bow.

6. If you’ll pluck the string, holding the whole thing by the yardstick in your closed hand, bending the yardstick into more or less of a bow, you’ll produce a kind of ba-voom noise, which sounds very much like some of the noises you’ve heard on television when the man with the checkered suit has had one drink too many.

You can also, by bending the yardstick more or less, play a tune on this—more or less. If you want to try different things, just take a rough stick and use it for a bow, like playing the violin, instead of plucking, and you can get a still different kind of noise by hitting the string with a stick while you bend the yardstick back and forth.