Howard's Very Sweet Homemade Pencil Box, 1864 doll house balustrades and also as if one

and also as if one should hold it up in a lightening storm to harness a bolt

lid opens easily

with arms wrapped around the shoulders and tail held between the toes

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

Its prior owner seems to have added an extra underline under BIG and a couple of extra exclamation points at the end--and also to have banged it around some and sliced it a few times with a blade

Howard's Very Sweet Homemade Pencil Box, 1864 doll house balustrades and also as if oneI'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