Howard's Very Sweet Homemade Pencil Box, 1864 doll house balustrades and all in good working

and all in good working order: hitting either of the chipmunks will knock them back

constructed around what looks to me like a pail

or could be hung by the hole in his back

lid opens easily

Howard's Very Sweet Homemade Pencil Box, 1864 doll house balustrades and all in good workingI've got a special weakness for old pencil boxes like antique school slates, the wooden frames of which often bear the carved initials of their onetime owners, so do pencil boxes tend to carry the traces of their users in a wonderfully intimate way. Which is very much the case with this very primitive one, found in Upstate New York, with HA emphatically carved into the face of the top, and then Howard, in cursive, inside, twice. And happily Howard had