I was born in Kansas when its inhabitants were largely Indians, and when its greatest resource was wild buffalo skins; and whatever objection you may have to this description of my present home-place between the coal-bearing Alleghenies and the sea, please do not imagine that I have a sophisticated sentimentality towards the Beauties of Nature! No, I am still enough of an Indian to think chiefly of my belly when I look at a stretch of country. In the West I like the suggestion of hog-and-hominy which spreads for miles and miles beneath the sky, and here in the East I like the promise of pillars of fire and smoke and I like the song of steam!
Bill's School and Mine! It may seem that I have said a great deal about my school, and very little about Bill's. But what is Bill's school? Surely, Bill's fine school-house and splendid teachers, and Bill's good mother are not all there is to Bill's school. No, Bill's school is as big as all Bethlehem, and in its bigger aspects it is a bad school, bad because Bill has no opportunity to play as a boy should play, and bad because Bill has no opportunity to work as a boy should work.
"I b'en a-kindo musin', as the feller says", and I'm About o' the conclusion that they ain't no better time, When you come to cypher on it, than the times we used to know, When we swore our first 'dog-gone-it' sorto solem'-like and low.
"You git my idy, do you?--LITTLE tads, you understand-- Jes' a wishin', thue and thue you, that you on'y was a MAN. Yet here I am this minute, even forty, to a day, And fergittin' all that's in it, wishin' jes the other way!"
I wonder if our Bill will "wish the other way" when he is a man? Indeed, I wonder if he will ever BE a man. If we could only count on that, Bill's school would not be our problem.
Never yet was a boy who dreamed of ice-cream sundaes while playing ball.
Never yet was a boy who dreamed of ice-cream sundaes while playing ball.
Every one knows that play means health and happiness to children, and nearly every one thinks of the playgrounds movement as based solely on ideals of health and ideals of happiness in a rather narrow sense; but the movement means much more than health and happiness as these terms are generally understood.