The school-going population meanwhile attend their schools, which used to be reached by means of the elevated cars or surface tramways for 2 1/2 cents and much cheaper if they have commuters' tickets. Many schools are near enough to be reached on foot. The children do not loiter on the way, but when school is out they hurry "home" to begin work in the garden, or to sit down to a meal on the veranda, which is relished far more than a meal in a city tenement house filled with fetid air and wanting in light. Nearly every one of these gardens has a flagpole, and at night a Japanese paper lantern with a tallow dip in it illuminates the veranda. These, with flags by day, make a festive appearance. The teachers find that city children who spend the five months in the open air are well equipped with elementary ideas in physical geography and astronomy. Their mental equipment is better, indeed, in all fields of thought, their physical health is improved, as well as their ethical motives and conduct. To realize the full extent of these wholesale efforts (for put children into close contact with nature and they will improve in all directions), it is well to take a ride on the North belt line (elevated steam railroad), the trains of which start from the Friedrich's street depot and bring one back after a ride of an hour and a half. Then one may do the same on the South belt line. On these two trips one will see, not hundreds, but tens of thousands of such "arbor gardens" full of happy women and children at work or play. The men come out on the belt line when their work in town is done. The writer was riding through the city on an open cab, and seeing hardly any children on the streets and in the parks, he asked, "How is it that we see no children out?" "Ah, sir," was the reply, "if you will see the children of Berlin you must go out to the arbor colonies outside of the city. There is where our children are." Subsequent visits to these colony gardens showed that Berlin is by no means a childless city. To judge from the multitudinous arbors to be seen from the windows of the belt line cars there must be 50,000 to 75,000 of them. As far as the eye reaches the flagpoles, the orderly fences, and the little structures can be seen; and since the city has 2,000,000 inhabitants, it is very likely that an estimate made by a city official of several hundred thousands of children thus living in the open air, is not excessive. The most beautiful and best-arranged gardens are not found in the vicinity of railroads, but several miles out toward the north and the south of the city. Here, where the soil is better, fine crops are raised.