The countryside itself seems to be painfully, culpably wanting in the first efforts for the supply of the need for normal, healthful play times. If public health is valued, if pure morals are desired, if home comfort is coveted, not to say if there is a wish that the girls and boys should remain and sustain the rural commonwealth of the future, the first thing to do to gain these ends would be to answer their unconscious outcry for more development of the play instinct. A wonderful woman of our time has written a book about the spirit of youth in the city street; some one should write one about the spirit of youth along the country road. We should awake that spirit and set it to singing on every road and lane, up hill and down dale, all over the prairies and all along the canyons. That this is a very vital matter is shown in a letter from a Country Girl. She wrote: "There was one thing I did want to ask you about and that was the need for social recreation, girlish recreation, wholesome, whole-hearted recreation. Judging by the girls I have taught both in country and village schools, it has seemed to me that they need to be taught to be girls, real girls, more than anything else, and to cherish that girlhood. There exists such a false relation between the girls and the boys. They are little stagy grown-ups playing at life, when they should be natural, wholesome children. I have wondered whether, if their social entertainments were different, and, if the true way could be shown them, they wouldn't leave the false and the sham, and be natural. Often the play ends in real disaster and young lives full of possibilities go down into the deeps. It is hard to express this in just these few words on paper but if you know country life as it still exists I am sure you will understand." This wise young woman has here linked the need for recreation and the dire necessity for moral restraint in a way to appeal to every student of country life and to every one that desires the well-being of the boys and girls there. When the factors in this problem are thus reduced to simple terms, it seems so easy to manage. The little things to do, the appalling disaster to be prevented! More recreation in the village--more girls saved from direst sorrow and downfall! Who would not spring to help? Is not the duty of the girls who are a little older or who have been away to school or college perfectly, translucently clear? Can you fail to see and feel it?