ural outdoor sports
like swimming and sailing and hunting and fishing and climbing and
riding. Hence we should give to these forms of recreation as large a
place as possible in our plans for exercise and amusement. We should see
clearly that the artificial indoor amusements, such as dancing,
card-playing, theater-going, billiard-playing, are especially liable to
give rise to that craving for excitement for excitement's sake which
perverts recreation from its true function as a renewer of our powers
into a ruinous drain upon them. The moment any form of recreation
becomes indispensable to us, the moment we find that it diminishes
instead of heightening our interest and delight in the regular duties of
our daily lives, that instant we should check its encroachment upon our
time and, if need be, cut it off altogether. It is impossible to lay
down hard and fast rules, telling precisely what forms of amusement are
good and what are bad. So much depends on the attitude of the individual
toward them, and the associations which they carry with them in
different localities, that what is right and beneficial for one person
in one set of surroundings would be wrong and disastrous to another
person or to the same person in other circumstances. To enable us to see
clearly the important part recreation must play in every healthy life,
and to see with equal clearness the danger of giving way to a craving
for constant and unnatural excitement, is the most that ethics can do
for us. The application of these principles to concrete cases each
parent must make for his own children, and each individual for himself.

THE VICE OF DEFECT.

+Neglect of exercise and recreation leads to moroseness.+--Like milk
which is allowed to stand, the spirit of man or woman, if left
unoccupied, turns sour. One secret of sourness and moroseness is the
sense that some side of our nature has been repressed; and this inward
indignation at our own wrongs we vent on others in bitterness and
complainings. Moroseness is first a sign that we ourselves are
miserable; and secondly it is the occasion of making others miserable
too. Having had Spencer's account of the benefits of the cheerfulness
that comes from adequate recreation, let us now see his description of
its opposite. "Far otherwise is it with one who is enfeebled by great
neglect of self. Already deficient, his energies are made more
deficient by constant endeavors to execute tasks that prove beyond his