Some of the most important part of your training and fitting for life is given by plays and games. Not only do they put you in better condition to study and enjoy your work in school, but they also teach you many valuable lessons as well. Our favorite national game, base-ball, for instance, not only develops the muscles of your arms and shoulders in throwing the ball and in striking and catching it, and your lungs and heart in rushing to catch a fly or in running the bases, but also develops quickness of sight and hearing,—requires, as we say, "a good eye" for distance,—makes you learn to calculate something of the speed at which a ball is coming toward you or flying up into the air, requires you to judge correctly how far it is to the next base and how few seconds it will take to get there and whether you or the baseman can get there first.
More important yet, like all team games, it teaches you to work with others, to obey orders promptly, to give up your own way and do, not what you like best, but what will help the team most; to keep your temper, to bend every energy to win, but to play fair. It also teaches you that you must begin at the beginning, take the lowest place, and gradually work yourself up; and that only by hard work and patience and determination can you make yourself worth anything to the team, to say nothing of becoming a "star" player.
If you will just go at your studies the way you do at base-ball, you will make a success of them. Make up your mind to gain a little at a time, to learn something new every day, and you will be astonished how your knowledge will mount up at the end of the year. When you first start in a new study, it looks, as you say, "like Greek" to you. You feel quite sure that you never will be able to understand those hard words or solve those problems "clear over in the back of the book." But remember how you started in on the diamond as a "green player," with fumbling fingers that missed half the balls thrown to you, with soft hands that stung every time you tried to stop a "hot" ball; how you ducked and flinched when a fast ball came at you, and how you fumbled half your flies and, even when you fielded them, were likely to send them in six feet over the baseman's head. But by quietly sticking to it—watching how the good players did it, and playing an hour or two every day during the season—you gradually grew into the game, until, almost without knowing how it happened, you had trained your muscles, your nerve cells, and your brain and found yourself a good batsman and a sure catcher.
TUG OF WAR
Good for muscle and will.
So it will be in your school work. Just stick quietly to it, taking your work a lesson at a time; give yourself plenty of sleep and plenty of fresh air, and eat plenty of good food three times a day, and your mind will grow in strength and skill as gradually, as naturally, and as happily as your body does.
Every season of the year has its special games suited to the weather and the condition of the ground. If you take pride in playing all of them in their turn, hard and thoroughly, and making as good a record in them as you can, you will find that it will not only keep you healthy and make you grow, but will help you in your school work as well, by keeping your wits bright and your head clear. There is a fine group of running games, for instance, such as Prisoner's Base, or Dare Base, Hide-and-Seek, or I Spy, and the different kinds of tag,—Fox-and-Geese, Duck-on-Rock,—which are not only capital exercise for leg muscles, lungs, and heart, but fine training in quickness of sight, quickness and accuracy of judgment, and quickness of ear in catching the slightest rustle on either side, or behind you, so that you can rush back to the base, or "home," first.
Then with the winter comes skating, with hockey and Prisoner's Base on the ice, and coasting and sledding and snow-balling, to say nothing of forts and snowmen. You should try to be out of doors as many hours a day in the winter-time as in the summer, so far as possible. If you play and romp hard, you will find that you don't mind the cold at all, and that, instead of taking more colds and chills, you will have fewer of these than you had when you cooped yourself up indoors beside the warm stove.
