Keep yourself in good condition, and then buckle down to your work as if that were the only thing there was in the world for the time being, and you will be surprised to find, not only how much more easily and quickly you will do your work, but how much better you will remember it afterwards. Do not set out to accomplish too much at a time; but when you undertake a task, don't let go until you have finished it. If you will train yourself in this way, you will soon find that it will seldom take you longer to master a lesson than it will to recite it. It is becoming more and more the custom in the best schools to plan to do all the school work in school hours, alternating periods of recitation and play with periods of study, so that no school-books need be taken home at night. This cannot always be done; but it is well to come as near to it as possible, in order, first, to learn to do work quickly and thoroughly and to drop it when it is finished, and, secondly, to give time to playing and resting and forming the priceless habit of reading. You will leave school some day, but you may still be a student in the great University of Books; and the pleasure of widening your knowledge and kindling your imagination will never fail you or pall on you as long as you live. An evening spent with newspapers and magazines, with books of travel and adventure, with good stories and poetry, with enjoyable and sensible parlor games such as authors, checkers, chess, charades, and with music and singing, will help you more with your lessons next day than two hours of listless yawning over text-books. [Illustration: THE HIGH JUMP Like the obstacle race, the high jump cultivates determination as well as muscle.] If you take your school work in this spirit, you will find that you will enjoy it quite as well as any other form of exercise--even play itself. The harder and more intelligently you play, the better you will be able to work in the schoolroom; and the harder and more intelligently you study, the more you will enjoy your play. CHAPTER XXIII THE LOOKOUT DEPARTMENT Why the Eyes, Ears, and Nose are Near the Mouth. If you had no eyes, ears, or nose, you might just as well be dead; and you soon would be, if you had no one to feed you and guide you about and take care of you. Naturally, all three of these scouts and spies of the body, which warn us of danger and guide us to food and shelter, are near the mouth, at the head-end of the body. The nose by means of which we smell food, to see whether it is sweet and good or not, is directly above the mouth; the eyes are above and on each side, like the lamps of an automobile, but swinging in sockets like search-lights; while the ears are a couple of inches behind, on each side of us, for catching from the sea of air the waves that we call sound.