decks and accoutrements. A queer, good answer comes to some from
softening and cleansing leather. There is a little boy here whose
occasional restlessness is magically done away with, if he is turned
loose with sponge and harness-dressing upon a saddle and bridle. He
sometimes rebels at first (before the task answers and the picture
comes) but presently he will appear wide-eyed and at peace, bent upon
showing his work.

Play is a drug and a bore, until one has worked. I do not believe in
athletics for athletics' sake. Many young men have been ruined by being
inordinately praised for physical prowess in early years. Praise for
bodily excellence appeals to deep vanities and is a subtle deranger of
the larger faculties of man. The athlete emerges into the world
expectant of praise. It is not forthcoming, and his real powers have
been untrained to earn the greater reward. Moreover the one-pointed
training for some great momentary physical stress, in field events, is a
body-breaker in itself, a fact which has been shown all too often and
dramatically. Baseball and billiards are great games, but as
life-quests--except for the few consummately adapted players whose
little orbit of powers finds completion in diamond or green-baized
rectangle--the excessive devotion to such play is desolating, indeed,
and that which is given in return is fickle and puerile adulation.

A man's work is the highest play. There is nothing that can compare with
it, as any of the world's workmen will tell you. It is the thing he
loves best to do--constructive play--giving play to his powers,
bringing him to that raptness which is full inner breathing and
timeless.... We use the woods and shore, water and sand and sun and
garden for recreation. In the few hours of afternoon after Chapel until
supper, no one here actually produces anything but vegetables and tan,
yet the life-theme goes on. We are lying in the sun, and some one
speaks; or some one brings down a bit of copy. We listen to the Lake;
the sound and feel of water is different every day. We find the
stingless bees on the bluff-path on the way to the bathing shore. It is
all water and shore, but there is one place where the silence is deeper,
the sun-stretch and sand-bar more perfect. We are very particular. One
has found that sand takes magnetism from the human body, as fast as
sunlight can give it, and he suggests that we rest upon the grass
above--that fallow lands are fruitful and full o