Then there is the lure of the water, which explains more than half his school truancy during the open season. It is a fine spring or summer day. The _Wanderlust_ of his ancestry is upon the boy. The periodic migration for game or with the herds, the free range of wood and stream, or the excitement of the chase pulsates in his blood. Voices of the far past call to something native in him. The shimmer of the water just as they of old saw it, the joyous chance of taking game from its unseen depths, or of getting the full flush of bodily sensation by plunging into it, the unbridled pursuit of one's own sweet will under the free air of heaven--these are the attractions over against which we place the school with its books, its restraint, and its feminine control; and the church with its hush and its Sunday-school lesson: and, too often, we offer nothing else. It is like giving a hungry woodchopper a doily, a Nabisco wafer, and a finger-bowl. If we could but appreciate the great crude past whose conflicts still persist in the boy's gruesome and tragic dreams, filling him with a fear of the dark, which fear in time past was the wholesome and necessary monitor of self-preservation; if we could only realize how strenuous must be those experiences which guarantee a strong body, a firm will, and an appetite for objective facts, we would not make our education so insipidly nice, so intellectual, so bookish, and so much under the roof. A school and a school building are not synonymous, a church and a church building are not synonymous; schooling is not identical with education, nor church attendance with religion. It is unfortunate if the boy beholds in these two essential institutions merely an emasculated police. If either the church or the school is to reach the boy it will have to recognize and perform its task very largely beyond the traditional limits of the institution as such, and with a heartiness and masculinity which are now often absent. In this field the indirect and extra-ecclesiastical work of the minister will be his best work, and the time that the teacher spends with his pupils outside the schoolhouse may have more educational value than that spent within. In due time society will be ready to appreciate and support the educator who is bigger than any building; and outdoor schools are bound to grow in favor. [Illustration: GETTING THE SPARK] [Illustration: GETTING THE FLAME] [Illustration: FIRE!]