let for December. Each child in turn is invited to jump
over the candles, and if the feat be accomplished without extinguishing
a single candle, prosperity and happiness are in store through all the
months of the coming year; but if one is put out, ill-luck threatens in
the month whose shining is thus eclipsed; while to knock one over,
predicts dire calamity.

SPIN THE PLATE

The players seat themselves in a circle except one who gives all a name
pertaining to the calendar and chooses a name for himself. If there are
twelve or less players, each take the name of a month. If more than a
dozen play name them January first, January second, etc.

The player standing in the center of the circle, with a tin plate,
places it upon its edge and spins it, at the same time calling out the
name of a month or day of the month which has been given to one of the
players.

The person named must jump up and catch the plate before it stops
spinning or he must pay a forfeit. It is then his turn to spin the plate
and call some one else into the center.

A NEW YEAR'S EVE ENTERTAINMENT

Look through your old newspapers and magazines and cut out all the
pictures of the famous men and women of the century you find--everybody,
from Decatur to Li Hung Chang, from Daniel Boone to Kruger, from Queen
Hortense to Helen Gould, from Coxey to Kipling. Clip the names off, and
make frames for them of pasteboard and gilt paper.

Write the invitations on the backs of your cards: "You are invited to
attend the opening of the Nineteenth Century Portrait Gallery, on New
Year's Eve,"--fixing the hours to suit yourself.

Then clear your drawing-room of all its furniture and pictures, covering
the walls with the pictures you have framed. In the middle of the floor
make a pedestal of two store boxes covered with a sheet, and on it stand
a girl dressed as the goddess of Fame--draped in a sheet, her hair
knotted in Grecian style, her bare arms hanging straight down, with a
laurel wreath in one hand, and in the other a little package neatly
tied. Light the room with four heavily shaded piano lamps, one in each
corner.

Outside the drawn portieres seat another girl dressed as Time, with
white hair and beard and hour-glass and scythe. And on the floor before
her put a basket woven of evergreens, and filled with little tablets,
each marked with all the numbers that are stuck in the corners of the
pictures. Four little girls of different sizes as the Seas