The miserable imitation called “roller-skating,” which is alarming thoughtful people in many of our villages, is only a craze, a temporary insanity; the winter sports of Canada are a national institution. The physical and moral wholesomeness of the roller-skating rink is more than doubtful. The moral and physical healthfulness of the sports by which Canadians make winter a season of joy, can not be questioned. On the average, our winter in the United States is not a healthful and invigorating season to us. We lose the greater values and expose ourselves to special dangers. We live in-doors, with a temperature ten degrees too high. We shut in with us invisible plagues which breed diphtheria and other diseases. We are enfeebled by refraining from exercise and breathing unwholesome air in our houses. We come to the spring weaker than we were when winter began. We have moped by hot fires and breathed vitiated air, when we ought to have been out in the winter blast, using our muscles and filling our lungs with the clean winds. Two or three conditions seem wanting for a reform of these habits. One is the art of keeping warm in the cold air; another is a keener sense of the value of winter exercise, and a third is some devices by which the “soft spells” of weather shall not arrest our sports nearly every week. THE RELATIVE PRONOUN “THAT.” This word is a demonstrative pronoun and a conjunction; and in some idiomatic phrases it is also a relative pronoun. By idiomatic phrases, we mean that use has constructed certain forms of expression which are wholes, though consisting of several words. _All that we know_ is an idiomatic phrase; use and habit have welded the words together. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there grew a habit of using _that_ very freely as a relative pronoun. The Bible of 1611 is full of illustrations of this habit. During the present century this use of _that_ has been by the best writers gradually restricted, and at present the rule for _that_ as a relative pronoun, probably, is about as stated above—the word is used, as a relative, only in idiomatic expressions. The history of this word would make a very interesting chapter. We have in the foregoing statement merely suggested one line of change in its use, and we call attention to this change for a particular reason. Among the excellent books published by Appleton & Co. is a reprint Cobbett’s English Grammar, and in this reprint Mr. Ayres, the editor of it for this republication, lays down in his introduction, and illustrates by significant bracketing in Cobbett’s text, a new rule for the use of the relative _that_. This new rule is, in substance, that the restrictive relative is _that_—_who_ and _which_ being coördinating relatives. This proposed reform is unfortunately timed. By a progress in use which has been unobtrusive, and unaided by dogmatism, the number of _thats_ on a printed page has been reduced to tolerable proportion. If we accept the