When you eat apples or bananas or oranges, don't throw the skins or peelings about, but put them in a garbage can or swill bucket or cover them with soft dirt in the garden or stable yard; and don't throw peanut shells, or scraps of paper and the like, about the streets or parks. You should begin to notice all these things and talk about them, and that will make other people begin to think about them, too. Then you can make gardens instead of leaving bare, untidy back yards. I think that nicely kept vegetable gardens are almost as pretty as flower gardens. If you cannot mow the lawn, you can at least cut the long grass on the edges; and that makes such a difference! It is wonderful how much boys and girls can do in making and keeping a city really beautiful. I hope that you have plenty of room to play in now. Of course, when you grow up, you will see that there are plenty of playgrounds and parks for the children. We are beginning to find out that the richest and the most beautiful city is the one whose streets are lined with families of happy, rosy-cheeked children. So, you see, the "City Beautiful" is the one that takes best care of her children, and she can do this only by keeping her streets and houses perfectly clean and seeing that the food her people get is fresh and good, and their drinking water pure. If the city or town you live in is not like this, be sure you do your very best to make it better. [Illustration: WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE A BACK YARD LIKE THIS?] [Illustration: OR LIKE THIS?] There is one great evil that for hundreds and hundreds of years has been known wherever people are crowded together, and even in the open country, too; and which has been the cause of more untidiness and uncleanliness and unhappiness and disease than any other evil ever known. And that is the drinking of alcohol. People don't drink clear alcohol, but they can get a great deal of it--enough to poison them badly--in the fermented drinks you learned about some time ago. In the days when your grandfather was a little boy, every man thought that ale and wine and whiskey were good foods for him when he was well; and good medicine when he was sick. He believed that they gave him an appetite, and increased his strength. But now we have found, by carefully studying the effects of alcohol, in laboratories and in hospitals, that these beliefs were almost entirely mistaken. We know that all that wine, beer, and whiskey do is to make people feel better for a little while, without making them actually stronger or better in any way. In fact, in most respects these drinks make them weaker and worse instead.