after day, with no protection but the leadings of our interests
as they direct our attention now to this phase of our environment, and
now to that.

INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT.--No small part of the influences which mold
our lives comes from our material environment. Good clothes, artistic
homes, beautiful pictures and decoration, attractive parks and lawns,
well-kept streets, well-bound books--all these have a direct moral and
educative value; on the other hand, squalor, disorder, and ugliness are
an incentive to ignorance and crime.

Hawthorne tells in "The Great Stone Face" of the boy Ernest, listening
to the tradition of a coming Wise Man who one day is to rule over the
Valley. The story sinks deep into the boy's heart, and he thinks and
dreams of the great and good man; and as he thinks and dreams, he spends
his boyhood days gazing across the valley at a distant mountain side
whose rocks and cliffs nature had formed into the outlines of a human
face remarkable for the nobleness and benignity of its expression. He
comes to love this Face and looks upon it as the prototype of the coming
Wise Man, until lo! as he dwells upon it and dreams about it, the
beautiful character which its expression typifies grows into his own
life, and he himself becomes the long-looked-for Wise Man.

THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY.--More powerful than the influence of
material environment, however, is that of other personalities upon
us--the touch of life upon life. A living personality contains a power
which grips hold of us, electrifies us, inspires us, and compels us to
new endeavor, or else degrades and debases us. None has failed to feel
at some time this life-touch, and to bless or curse the day when its
influence came upon him. Either consciously or unconsciously such a
personality becomes our ideal and model; we idolize it, idealize it, and
imitate it, until it becomes a part of us. Not only do we find these
great personalities living in the flesh, but we find them also in books,
from whose pages they speak to us, and to whose influence we respond.

And not in the _great_ personalities alone does the power to influence
reside. From _every life_ which touches ours, a stream of influence
great or small is entering our life and helping to mold it. Nor are we
to forget that this influence is reciprocal, and that we are reacting
upon others up to the measure of the powers that are in us.

4. THE INSTINCT OF PLAY

Small use to be a c