The church in which I began my ministry used to have a play every Christmas. We built out the pulpit platform with boards, we hung it around with curtains, giving dressing-room space, and we placed lanterns in front for foot-lights. The first play we gave made us anxious, for the neighborhood was an old Quaker settlement; but we found that the Quakers enjoyed the play immensely and were the best actors. We made it a genuine expression of the Christmas spirit. We abolished the old "speaking pieces." Our little stage offered the young people team work, instead of individual elocution. The rehearsals filled a whole month with happy and valuable meetings. Everybody co-operated in the labor necessary to prepare the decorations and to take them down, during Christmas week, and on the night of the play everybody was on hand, Catholic, Protestant and heathen. The holidays of the passing year suggest the recreations of the country church. These should not necessarily be productive of sweat, but the country boy and girl do need the recreation of laughter and happy meeting and social liveliness. Farm work is lonely and monotonous. Such immorality as there is in the country has direct connection with the tedium and dullness of long hours out-doors, alone. The recreations of country life should be meetings for the celebration of great events of the year. Easter expresses ideas which are age-old among country people: it is both a pagan festival and a Christian anniversary. If Easter is developed in a celebration of song or procession, of sermon and of decoration, with full use of its symbolic value, it is sure to bring the whole countryside together, in an experience of the New Year rising from the grave of winter and of the divine Lord risen from the dead. Most country communities have no such celebration. In very many the whole year passes without neighbors meeting for a common social experience. This is why people move to the city, because every city, great and small, has in the course of the year some events which bring all the people to the curbstone. Country life has few such times and therefore it is dull, because the richest experience of mankind is the experience of common social joy. The best recreation is acquaintance and conversation. The farmer's son spends many hours in silence. He wants someone to help him to talk, and to talk unto some purpose. The Fourth of July is celebrated in Rock Creek, an Illinois community, by a "wild animal show." Instead of explosives, which are discouraged, the boys of the community bring together in small cages their animal pets. The boys are encouraged to make small carts for the transportation of their pets, and the crowning event of the day is the procession of these carts, in an open place, before the great dinner, at which the countryside sits down together.