The farm needs more cottages, many more of them, for Mr. Hinckley has been obliged to refuse nearly 700 applications for admission to Good Will this year for lack of accommodations. It also needs a manual training-school, and needs it very much indeed. We, the Knights and Ladies of the Round Table, promised, more than two years ago, to build that school for them; but we haven't done it yet, and when visitors to the farm ask to be shown the Round Table building they are led to a most beautiful site, on which rest two great piles of stone, hauled there for the foundations. They are told that here is where the school will stand whenever the young Knights and Ladies get ready to build it; and Mr. Hinckley always adds, "They are certain to do it, for they have promised, and I have never yet been disappointed in any promise made in connection with this work."
It made me feel awfully ashamed to think that we made that promise two years ago and had not fulfilled it yet. How do you feel about it?
All the work of the farm is done by the boys themselves. They chop wood, and fetch water, and plough, and make hay, and bake all the bread, and wait on table, and sweep, and do a thousand other things, besides having regular study hours and drills. In addition to all this they somehow find time to attend to their own little private gardens—the produce of which, is bought by the Farm at the regular market price—to play ball, go in swimming, build "Cubbies" or cubby houses down by the river out of bits of refuse lumber, and do almost everything else that hearty, happy boys find to do in the country.
The most striking features of the farm are the utter absence of profanity or even vulgar language, for I did not hear a word while there that could not have been uttered with perfect propriety in a Sunday-school; the prompt obedience to orders; the happy, homelike air pervading the whole farm, and Mr. Hinckley's infinite patience in dealing with the boys. He is always ready to listen to them, always ready to advise them, and is always interested in their most trivial affairs. As he says, "If I encourage them to come to me freely with their little perplexities, they will come to me for advice concerning their greater affairs later on."
One boy is kept at the farm by an Odd Fellows Association, of which his father was a member, and who have pledged $100 per year for his support until he is fitted to care for himself. The head waiter of the dining-room, a merry-faced, curly-headed, sixteen-year-old chap, is to be sent through Bowdoin by this year's graduating class of that college; while this year's class of Colby has promised to send another Good Will boy through that university.
Many of the boys don't want to go to college, but are very anxious to learn trades. The present facilities for teaching them are two carpenter benches and a few tools, all huddled into one little room in the old farm-house. Now don't you think this is a splendid charity, and that those boys need that manual training-school, and that it is a fine thing for us to work for? I do; though I must confess that I wasn't very greatly interested before I went there. But that was because I didn't know about it, and the reason the school building that we promised isn't occupying the lovely site set apart for it is because you haven't really known about it. But now you know about it, for I have been there and have told you something of what I saw; and I feel certain that you will believe that all I have said is true. So now we will go to work and build that school, won't we? Do you know that even five cents apiece from each Knight and Lady of the Round Table would do it? Who will follow me if I head a—let me say, ten-cent subscription list for the Good Will Farm Industrial School? I am sure every member of all the "K. M." chapters will, and I am almost certain that every member of our splendid order of modern chivalry will. At any rate, I am going to try it, and shall enclose a dime in this very letter to Messrs. Harper & Bros. Next summer I want to go again to Good Will Farm; but I shall not unless that school building is ready for dedication. In the mean time, I remain to all the Knights and Ladies of the Round Table, their loving friend and fellow-member,
Kirk Munroe.
The "Do-Without" Society.
Should one ask which has been the most heroic age of the world we believe that the right answer would be "the nineteenth century." In past centuries a few were imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice. To-day this spirit is manifest in nearly every life. Everybody seems to be trying to help somebody else—to lift those just below them to a higher plane of living and of thinking. It is said that the oldest book in existence is one devoted to a harangue on the evils of the time, and a longing for the good old times. Doubtless the last book that will ever be written will be in the same vein. But for all that the world is growing better.