Make everything as short and snappy as you can. Throughout the programme, work in all classes and ages as best you may. Don't, for instance, put all the contests in which the little ones engage in the same part of the day. In the second place, arrange a literary and religious programme that shall give a spiritual application to all these physical contests. Organize a Sunday-school choir, which, after careful previous practice, will sing some of the many songs that treat the Christian life as a race, or a wrestling, or a battle. Some of the Bible passages of similar tenor should be recited. Poems may be repeated bearing the same lesson. And the brightest of the scholars and teachers, of course not omitting your pastor, will give some very brief little essays or talks along this same line. This part of the day's programme may fitly be placed just after lunch, when in the heat of the day the athletes will wish to rest, and when all will be ready to sit down and listen. Much will depend on the master of ceremonies for the day. Let him be the jolliest man you can find, but withal a man of deep consecration, who can make all feel that, whether they eat or drink, or play games, or whatever they do, they must do all for the glory of God. In this spirit alone can you hope to have a profitable picnic. Chapter XXXVII A Singing Sunday-School Lifeless singing means, usually, a dead Sunday-school. Many a superintendent might greatly increase the vigor of his school by getting a little snap into the music. Different ways of singing will not of themselves solve the problem, but they will go far toward it. Here are a few methods which will add to the singing the variety that is the spice of it as well as of nearly everything else. Try reading the song in concert before it is sung. It would puzzle most even of us older folks to tell, after we have sung a hymn, what is in it. Concert reading brings out unsuspected beauties of thought, and the hymn will be sung afterward with fresh zest and with fuller intelligence. The superintendent may vary this plan by reading the stanzas alternately with the school, or the girls may alternate with the boys. Occasionally get a single scholar to read the hymn before the school, or, what is far better, to commit it to memory and recite it. Indeed, memory hymns, to be committed to memory by the entire school, and sung without the book, will prove very popular. Select songs that are worth learning for their words as well as for their music,--a thing which, alas! cannot be said of all our Sunday-school songs. One memory hymn a month might possibly be achieved, and your children will rapidly grow independent of hymn-books, as their grandsires were.