Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/801

Rh or Botanical Gardens. After this he will return home, and, ably and artistically assisted, will dress for dinner. The dinner, in accordance with his life, will be elegant, sumptuous, entertaining, whether he take it at his own table or abroad. After dinner he may probably go to a ball and dance until two or three in the morning; or, if there be no ball on hand, he may have another rubber, or a round at billiards, or a turn at the play, the opera, or the concert-room, with a final friendly chat and smoke before retiring for rest.

To this gentleman—and I am penciling a true and honest gentleman, not a modern rake of any school of rakes—this mode of life is a persistent pleasure, and to many more it would, I doubt not, be a perpetual holiday. To me it would be something worse than death. The monotony of it would be a positive misery, and I am conscious that many would be found to share with me in the same dislike.

Some will say that is all true enough with respect to persons who have passed out of youth into manhood, but that when life is young the distinctive appreciations for different modes of recreative pleasures are not so well marked out. I doubt, for my own part, this belief. It seems to me that in childhood the tastes for recreative enjoyment are as varied as they are in later years, with this difference, that they are not so effectively expressed. The little mind is ever in fear of the greater, and is often forced to express a gladness or pleasure which it does not truly feel. When children, left to themselves, are independently observed, nothing can be move striking to the observer than the difference of taste that is expressed in respect to the games at which they shall play. More than half the noise and quarrel of the nursery is, in fact, made up of this difference of feeling as to the character of the game that shall be constituted a pastime. In the end, on the rule, I suppose, of the survival of the fittest, the strongest children have their way, and one or two little tyrants drag the rest into their own delights.

I should, on the grounds here stated, venture, then, to say that there is, in point of fact, no more actual difference between work and recreation than what exists as a mere matter of sentiment: that recreation is a question of sentiment altogether, both in the young and the old.

If we could get this fact into our minds in our educational schemes for the young, we should accomplish at once a positive revolution in the training of the young, which revolution would, I think, be attended by the happiest change and train of thought in those who, in the future, shall pass through the first stages of life to adolescence and maturity. The search for amusements, and for new amusements, among the well-to-do would not be needed, since the mind from the first would be naturally brought to find a new delight in each act new called labor. The word "labor," in short, might drop altogether; the praise of labor, which is so often extolled, would find its true meaning; and the blame