The display and satisfaction of the play instinct spell work, oftentimes most laborious work carefully planned and elaborately carried out. The successful pursuit of games of all sorts requires not only work but oftentimes protracted physical training and profound physical effort. The Italians do not take kindly to them. In the south of Italy there are six months of the year and often more when no one is keenly disposed to active physical effort and at no time in the year is there that atmospheric incitation to physical activity that exists in England or in our own country. It may well be that children of the South do not take kindly to play because of the great and protracted heat, during which they are taught to remain within doors several hours in the middle of the day, and children of the lower classes are often obliged to work during the cool hours. Italian children mature very early, and the emotional disequilibrium that comes with the supremacy of a new internal secretion makes them self-conscious, bashful, retiring, and inimical to play. I am not inclined to lay much stress on any of these occurrences as an explanation for the apathy for play shown by Italian children. Jewish children, who live in countries quite as hot as Italy, and who certainly mature as early as Italian children, are naturally playful, and not only playful but inventive of games. If one reads the biographies of some of the literary Hebrews of America who have set forth in print their renunciations and their successes, it will be seen that despite their most unfavorable surroundings the play instinct in childhood--which, after all, is the imaginative faculty--is often very strong. Another thing that is very curious in Italy is that children of both sexes do not play together. It is true that no particular effort is made to keep them apart when they are very young, but there is no more unusual sight in Italy than a boy from ten to fourteen with a girl of the same age, unless it is to see a young man with a young woman who is not his wife. There is no open and fraternizing relationship between the sexes. If you say in Italy that a young woman is the _amica_ or friend of a man, you mean what is signified in French by _chère amie_. In certain parts of Italy, and particularly in the South, the position of women in society and in relationship to men savors very much of the Oriental.