“I wish I was in the country now”. “I shall never go again; I am too old now.” “I think in the fortnight I had more treats than ever before in all my life.” “The blacking berries were red then and small. They will be black now and big.” “I wish I was with my lady’s baker taking the bread round.” “I enjoyed myself very much, I cannot explain how much. Please God next year I will come again. As I sit at school I always imagine myself roaming in the fields and watching the golden corn, and when I think of it it makes me cry.” And those tears will find companions in some of the hearts which ache for the joyless lives of our town children, weighted by responsibilities, crippled by poverty, robbed of their birthright of innocent fun. The ecstatic joy of children in response to such simple pleasures tells volumes about their drab existence, their appreciation of adequate food, their warm recognition of kindness, represent privation and surprise. In a deeper sense than Wordsworth used it, “Their gratitude has left me mourning”. I know, and no one better, the countless servants of the people who are toiling to relieve the sorrows of the poor and their children, but until the conditions of labour, of education, and of housing are fearlessly faced and radically dealt with, their labour can only be palliative and their efforts barren of the best fruit; but articles, as well as holidays, must finish, and so I will conclude by another extract:-- “We had a bottle of Tea and cake and it was 132¾ miles. I saw all sorts of things and come to Waterloo Station and thank you very much.” HENRIETTA O. BARNETT. THE RECREATION OF THE PEOPLE.[1] BY CANON BARNETT. July, 1907. [1] From “The Cornhill Magazine”. By permission of the Editor. Work may, as Carlyle says, be a blessing, but work is not undertaken for work’s sake. Work is part of the universal struggle for existence. Men work to live. But the animal world early found that existence does not consist in keeping alive. All animals play. They let off surplus energy in imitating their own activities, and they recreate exhausted powers by change of occupation. Man, as soon as he came into his inheritance of reason, recognized play as an object of desire, and as well as working for his existence, and perhaps even before he worked to obtain power and glory, he worked to obtain recreation. A man, according to Schiller’s famous saying, is fully human only when he plays.