Children must make noise, and a great deal of it, to be healthy. The shouts, the racket, the tumble and turmoil they make, are nature’s way of ventilating their bodies, of sending the breath full into the very last corner of the lungs, and the blood and nervous fluid into every cord and fibre of their muscles. Instead of quelling their riot, it would be a blessing to older folks to join it with them. There is an awful truth following this assertion. Do you know that men and women go mad after the natural stimulus which free air and bounding exercise supply? It is the lack of this most powerful inspiration, which knows no reaction, that makes them drunkards, gamesters, and flings them into every dissipation of body and soul. Men and women, especially those leading studious, repressed lives, often confess to a longing for some fierce, brief madness that would unseat the incubus of their lives. Clergymen, editors, writing women, and those who lead sedentary lives, have said in your hearing and mine that something ailed them they could not understand. They felt as if they would like to go on a spree, dance the tarantella, or scream till they were tired. They thought it the moving of some depraved impulse not yet rooted out of their natures, and to subdue it cost them hours of struggle and mortification. Poor souls! They need not have visited themselves severely if they had known the truth that this lawless longing was the cry of idle nerve and muscle, frantic through disuse. What the clergyman wanted was to leave his books and his subdued demeanor for the hill-country, for the woods, where he could not only walk, but leap, run, shout, and wrestle, and sing at the full strength of his voice. The editor needed to leave his cigar and the midnight gas-light for a wherry race, or a jolly roll and tumble on the green. The woman, most of all, wanted a tent built for her on the shore, or on the dry heights of the pine forest, where she would have to take sun by day and balsamic air by night; where she would have to leap brooks, gather her own fire-wood, climb rocks, and laugh at her own mishaps. Or, if she were city-pent, she needed to take some child to the Park and play ball with it, and run as I saw an elegant girl dressed in velvet and furs run through Madison Square one winter day with her little sister. The nervous, capricious woman must be sent to swimming-school, or learn to throw quoits or jump the rope, to wrestle or to sing. There is nothing better for body and mind than learning to sing, with proper method, under a teacher who knows how to direct the force of the voice, to watch the strength, and expand the emotions at the same time. The health of many women begins to improve from the time they study music. Why? Because it furnishes an outlet for their feelings, and equally because singing exerts the lungs and muscles of the chest which lie inactive. The power for the highest as well as the lowest note is