In Mr J. Wilson's Report, there are many points unattainable to moderate incomes and circumscribed resources, but many also that it is in the power of every man of education, and consequently of influence, to carry out in his neighbourhood. Amongst them is that simple item of the cricket-field and garden-ground. It has become so much the fashion among certain of us, renowned more for zeal than knowledge, to cry down all amusements for the people, as tending to the subversion and overthrow of morality, to shut them out from all but the church, the conventicle, and the gin-shop--that any recognition of this mistake in a more liberal arrangement, may be hailed as the inauguration of an era of common sense, and consequently of true morality. Amusements are absolutely necessary for mankind. The nation never existed on this earth which could dispense with them. Sects rise up every now and then which carry their abhorrence of all that is not fanaticism--after their own pattern--to the extreme, and which lay pleasure under the same curse with vice; but sects are cometic, and are not to be judged of after the generalisations of national character. Practically, we find that rigidness and vice, amusements and morality, go together, Siamese-like. In the year of the Crystal Palace, the London magistrates had fewer petty criminals brought before them than at any other period of the same duration; and what Mr Wilson proves in his cricket-ground, what London shewed in the time of the World's Fair, generations and countries would always exhibit in larger characters, more widely read--that the mind and body of man require amusement--simple pleasure--purposeless, aimless, unintellectual, physical pleasure--as much as his digestive organs require food and his hands work; not as the sole employment, but mixed in with, and forming the basis and the body of higher things--the strong practical woof through which the warp of golden stuff is woven into a glorious fabric--a glorious fabric of national progression. Yes, and into a wider garment still; one that will cover many an outlying Bedouin cowering in the darkness round--one that will join together the high and the low, the good and the bad, and so knead up the baser element into amalgamation with and absorption into the higher. This is no ideal theory. It is a possibility, a practical fact, proved in this place and in that--wherever men have taken the trouble to act on rational bases and on a true acceptation of the needs of human nature. For as the quality of light is to spread, and as the higher things will always absorb the lower, so will schools and kindly sympathy diffuse knowledge and virtue among the ignorant and brutalised; and Love to Humanity will once more read its mission in the salvation of a world. OUT-OF-DOORS LIFE IN CENTRAL EUROPE.