The expression, "Many a good sailor is spoiled by being shut up in a shop when he ought to be on the bridge, or aloft trimming sail," is true and might be changed to adapt itself to many misfit occupations. One thing is certain, and that is, if the occupation is not productive of happiness it is a misfit. The development of the kindergarten and manual-training schools has revealed the possibilities of cultivating character and habit along the line of useful preference and has been even more important to the evolution of usefulness than has the harnessing of the forces of nature for the use of man in performing the drudgery of work. From a minor branch of education, the character-building and habit-forming schools that are developing out of the success of the kindergarten method will come to be recognized as the _basis of government, in that they are the nurseries of good citizenship_. Reiteration of this statement cannot rightly be criticised, for it is the ever-recurring theme on which the development of social harmony is being built. The restless energy of children often provokes the remark, "Oh! if the energy the little ones expend could only be gathered and stored for useful application, we grown folks might take it easy." True enough! and what we propose, as a means towards a quarantine that will prevent in some degree any misdirection of this God-given and irrepressible energy, can accomplish the wish. Many separate movements have been instituted to take children out of unwholesome surroundings and give them new views of life. The New York _Life_ and _The Daily News_, of Chicago, have championed fresh air funds for the purpose of giving infants days or weeks of outing at lake or sea side, or on farms, and have built commodious pavilions for their comfort. The Rev. Doctor Gray of the Forward Movement takes many separate squads of little ones into the country each summer for a two weeks' season of camping, while the residents on the shores of beautiful Lake Geneva, Wis., take out over five hundred waifs--ninety at a time--from Chicago and give them a two weeks' summer vacation at the "Holiday Home," located in the midst of their villas. In this year of 1898 provision has been made by the Board of Education of Chicago for a two months' school session during vacation, where the instruction chiefly includes courses of art and nature-study. Provision was made for two thousand children, but the applications numbered more than four thousand and the disappointment of the rejected ones was pitiful to see.[5] The parental farms established in Massachusetts and elsewhere throughout the land have done a wonderful work and show a crying need for many more of them.[6]