"The games chiefly played by boys are football, cricket and rounders, according to the season. Girls enjoy a greater variety, and in addition to cricket and rounders, are initiated into the mysteries of hockey, basket ball, target ball, and other ball games. "The advantages of the children being taught to get the best exercise out of the games, and to become skilful in them, are obvious. "Arrangements have been made with the various local athletic associations and consultative committees whereby in each metropolitan borough there are hon. district representatives (masters and mistresses) in connection with organised games. Pitches are reserved in over thirty of the L.C.C. parks and open spaces for the use of schools. The apparatus required is generally stored at the playing-fields for the common use of all schools attending, but small articles such as balls, bats, sticks are supplied to each school. "The Council has decided that, so far as practicable, the apparatus for organised games shall be made at the Council's educational institutes, and, as a result of this decision, much of it is fashioned at the handicraft centres." This is all for good. But I am concerned for adolescent youth that has left school--the lads whose home conditions absolutely prevent the evening hours being spent indoors. Is there to be no provision for them? CHAPTER XI. ON THE VERGE OF THE UNDERWORLD Charles Dickens has somewhere said, "The ties that bind the rich to their homes may be made on earth, but the ties that bind the poor to their homes are made of truer metal and bear the stamp of Heaven." And he adds that the wealthy may love their home because of the gold, silver and costly things therein, or because of the family history. But that when the poor love their homes, it is because their household gods are gods of flesh and blood. Dickens's testimony is surely true, for struggle, cares, sufferings and anxieties make their poor homes, even though they be consecrated with pure affection, "serious and solemn places." To me it has always been evident that the heaviest part of the burden inseparable from a poor man's home falls upon the wife.