sham, and be natural. Often the play ends
in real disaster and young lives full of possibilities go down
into the deeps. It is hard to express this in just these few words
on paper but if you know country life as it still exists I am sure
you will understand."

This wise young woman has here linked the need for recreation and the
dire necessity for moral restraint in a way to appeal to every student
of country life and to every one that desires the well-being of the boys
and girls there.

When the factors in this problem are thus reduced to simple terms, it
seems so easy to manage. The little things to do, the appalling disaster
to be prevented! More recreation in the village--more girls saved from
direst sorrow and downfall! Who would not spring to help? Is not the
duty of the girls who are a little older or who have been away to school
or college perfectly, translucently clear? Can you fail to see and feel
it?

There was a story of lost opportunity unconsciously revealed in the
letter of a college girl, who lives in a long valley between mountains
where the young people come in great numbers to do the hop-picking. The
plan for living included tents and an eating-table in common. There were
dances at night and much drunkenness. The writer added a tragic
description of what happens under these circumstances and of the
terrible results that follow the orgy.

What is that Country Girl thinking of, that she should waste this
opportunity? Why does she not do something for those girls?

What can she do? Organize something! Form some kind of an association.
Get the girls together--but not at just the last moment before the great
wave rises above their heads. We must build up beforehand; we must
start in at foundations; little by little we must undermine wrong
likings and insert slowly in their places better likings. We cannot
force the growth of the better things; they must grow naturally. Working
thus for days and months and years, we may at last cause a better
feeling, a better taste; we may develop greater self-control that will
be permanent because based on higher ideals and nobler desires.

The young woman who wrote that letter was educated in an Eastern college
and went from there to a farm in the West, finding a home at last in
this beautiful valley. Who knows but that her whole life and career was
ordained in this wandering way in order that she might come to that
special valley and seeing t