Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/812

792 to harmful recreations to an extreme degree. The domestic class therefore presents, on the whole, a fairly healthy life. The majority of its members are women and mothers; and, in the gladness with which they tender their love and adoration to the young and innocent life that comes into their charge, they find perchance, after all, the purest pleasure, the most enhancing, the most ennobling recreation, that, even in the midst of many cares and sorrows and bereavements, falls to the lot of any section of the great community.

The agricultural class, less favored in recreative opportunities than the others which have passed before us, living a laborious and very poor life, ever at work for small returns, and finding little recreation beyond that which is of mere animal enjoyment, is still comparatively favored. To the agricultural worker the seasons supply, imperceptibly, some delight that is beneficial to the mind.

The labor of the out-door agricultural class, blessed by these changing scenes which the exquisite poet above quoted so exquisitely describes, is varied also in itself. Each season brings its new duty: the spring its meadow-laying and sheep-shearing; the summer its haymaking; the autumn its harvesting and harvest-home, and fruit-gathering; the winter its plowing and garnering, and cattle-tending; with sundry well-remembered holidays which are religiously kept. There may be through all this continuous wearing labor; there is; but, as it is not monotonous, it is to some extent recreative, and the facts of mortality tell that it is saving to life. The agricultural classes present a mortality below the average in the proportion of ninety-one to one hundred of the mass of the working community. Moreover, there is hope for the agricultural classes in the fact that it is comparatively an easy task to supply them with a perfect roundelay of beautiful recreations for their resting hours. It is only to remove from them the grand temptations to vice in the beer-shop and the spirit-store, and to substitute for these resorts a rational system of enjoyments, to win for the country swain the first place in that symmetry which Plato called "right good."

The utter blankness, the blankness that may be felt, in respect to recreation is realized most in the millions of the industrial class who live in the everlasting din of the same mechanical life; who see ever before them the same four walls, the same tools, the same tasks; who