But the playing-field has also an important social function. Games are really the great social events of boyhood; in them he learns the great art of getting on with his fellows. It is a curious sight to watch a group of little boys when they first begin to play ball together. Such wrangling and disputings as there are, such refusals to play unless each can have completely his own way, such protracted controversy over each least difference of opinion! Shortly, to begin with, each little boy takes his bat or his ball, and departs for home and sand pile. The next day they will play together a little longer. They are beginning to learn one of the great lessons of life, and by the time these boys have “made” their college team, their nice adjustment of nerve and muscle will be hardly more manifest than their utter conformity of intelligence and will. The erstwhile discordant group will have become a single instrument. The separate individuals will have been trained to coöperation. Thus the playing-field confers both a muscular and a social education. While it is training the muscular sense, it is cultivating also the sense of human brotherhood, and the knack of getting on with other people. “Activities calling for coöperation and self-sacrifice,” says Luther Gulick, “form the natural basis upon which a life of service can be built.... This life for others is far more probable, natural, and tangible, when it comes as the natural unfolding or development of that instinct which has its first great impulse of growth in the games of adolescence.” The wise parent, therefore, will look well to his sons’ games for reasons which do not lie wholly on the surface. The money that he spends on bats and balls and mits is going toward their education, and in no other way will he get more education for his money. It will be recalled that one of the past members of the Tennis Club believed if he had remained in the gang, it would have saved him from the Reform School. This was an especially fine gang, and its goodness was in no small measure due to the same Mr. M. who took the boys camping. He saw to it that the boys had a place to play and apparatus to play with, and he used the gang in dealing with boys, as he probably used club and lodge and union in dealing with men, “for all there was in it.”