twelve-hour day in a foundry. Nevertheless here is leisure knocking at our door. The alarmist sees no alternative save exchanging stupidity for sin. He is confident that, when Satan finds men freed from the plow, the tool, and the ledger, he will impress their idle hands into working for his nefarious ends. We cannot quite share such pessimism, but there is a responsibility upon us to see that the new leisure means enrichment of life and not impoverishment.

II

We should like to use the word "avocation" to describe the activities which add, not to the financial gain of the individual, but to his joy and to his intellectual and spiritual betterment. But the dictionary stands like a rock in the way. Ponderously, inviting no rebuttal, it stresses the beauty of a life of vocational dedication, and gives moral sanction to the barren pursuit of the dollar by defining avocation as "that which calls one away from one's proper business". The only mollification lies in the illustrative quotation: "Heaven is his vocation, and therefore he counts earthly employments avocation." No matter how set his heart might be upon eternal salvation, he would be a rare enthusiast who could get a thrill out of regarding the selling of hardware as an avocation. We shall be forced to seek for some other word to describe what avocation is not allowed to mean.

Fortunately the dictionary compensates for its glacial definition of avocation by the genial spirit in which it expounds the meaning of hobby. A hobby is "any favorite object, pursuit, or topic, that which a person persistently pursues or dwells upon with zeal and delight".

Many persons dig ditches, or sell silk, or pour molten steel into molds, or load freight cars, or clean office buildings, or run elevators, but seldom with "zeal and delight". Few individuals lack the capacity to be stirred and refreshed by the use and exercise of such emotions, and many are the hours of leisure to be illuminated by their cultivation, and the hours of boredom to be held at bay by their help.

What better way is there for us to meet our changing social and working conditions than by cultivating hobbies, not to

escape our "proper business", but to fill our lives with new interests, and to give richer service by the aid of a refreshed and invigorated personality?

The British have much to teach us in the wise use of our leisure hours. With them the hobby is a mark of distinction. To be without a hobby is to be a sodden creature, the victim of commercialism, or an Esau who has sold his birthright for a daily job. That compendium of distinction, the British Who's Who, makes open recognition of the place of hobbies in British life. Unlike our American Who's Who, the British has a special division in which are entered the recreations of the men whose names and achievements are listed in the book. Every Englishman is interested to know how every other Englishman spends his free time. Our American roster of notables soberly omits any mention of such details, matters of negligible importance to a serious nation bent on production and efficiency. British achievements do not, however, seem to suffer by comparison with ours in spite of our single-minded devotion to accomplishment.

An Earl Grey guides the foreign policy of the British empire in the most critical months of its history, and yet he confesses to a love of birds, which leads him into the woods hours in a day and many days in the year, wandering in the haunts of the little wild creatures and listening to their songs. A commissioner on industrial poisons is an authority on stained glass windows; the passion of a professor of medicine, stationed in Cairo, is sketching; an eminent jurist combines travel and geology as his forms of recreation; the Governor of Fiji fills his free time with art photography and the amateur pursuit of architecture; Younghusband has a penchant for mastering little-known Oriental tongues, and when the expedition to Thibet is organized his hobby marks him for leadership; Sir Robert Hart softens the rigors of official life in the Orient by enthusiastic acquisition of a knowledge of Chinese embroideries and lacquers; Tyndall becomes a mountain climber, and carries his scientific point of view to the top of the highest Alps; a great financier finds music the solace of his idle hours.

Such enthusiasms suggest a very high stage of civilization. The one characteristic clearly distinguishing man from the beasts is his pursuit of the unessential, his love for the extraneous, his

passion for the genetically unimportant. Who can imagine a polar bear trying to go farthest north, or a marmot climbing to get the view from the mountain top, or a bird distinguishing trees by their annual shedding of leaves, or a monkey attempting to understand the language of the parrots, or the seals playing ball on the Pribiloff Islands? Yet every one of these creatures feverishly hunts his food, works to protect himself from the weather and from his enemies, and, like the American industrialist, dies promptly when he retires from his regular business in life. A man may follow his faithful, plodding way through the arduous duties of the working day, but he shows that he has the divine spark of the poet and the adventurer when he spends his free time plunging through the wilderness and up the rugged mountain side to add the sight of another raven's nest to his list of happy memories. The teacher of reluctant youth will freshen his own life, and by indirection that of his students, by his search, in hushed expectancy, for new species of mushroom on remote hillsides or in wooded hollows. A ghostly coral mushroom may bring him the same enlarging thrill that came to Balboa on a peak in Darien. He can pursue the cryptogams with a "zeal and delight" seldom vouchsafed to the correction of daily exercises in algebra.

Educators have occasionally tried to illuminate daily drudgery by bringing out its social implications, or by relating it to picturesque aspects of industrial growth. Young cotton spinners have been instructed in the ways of raising cotton, its transportation, its commercial metamorphoses, its dyeing, the art of design, the romance of the cotton gin, and the dependence of the cotton industry on the law of supply and demand. But ninety-eight in every hundred spinners, though they may work contentedly and with an interest in the job during their hours in the factory, will leave at night little the richer, save in wages, for the long day's doings. Fortunate indeed is he whose daily task can be carried on with "zeal and delight". Some activity outside the dull walls of the office and the mill is needed to bring that inspiration to most of us.

How can our people be helped to sweeten their days and better their lives by the acquisition of hobbies? The schools would

find it difficult to accomplish the task unaided, for a hobby is like a disease, most readily acquired by contact with one already infected. Fortunately some teachers ride hobbies of their own, and others pursue their specialties with such "zeal and delight" that they can qualify as inspirers to hobby riding as they follow their vocations. The community has its amateur enthusiasts, sufficiently unprofessional to give courage to the timid, who must be impressed into the service, invited to speak in the schools, urged to form clubs of young people to exchange stamps, or collect rocks, or practice decorative book binding, or press weeds, or study the constellations, or make marionettes, or design book plates, or hunt for Indian remains, or draw contour maps, or learn the spider webs, or study rug patterns, or make paintings of the eggs of birds.

These potential teachers of our ill-equipped heirs of leisure are all about us. The private secretary who cultivates dahlias; the stenographer who makes fairy gardens in a flower pot; the banker who keeps bees in his attic; the minister who corrects his social theories by observations on his little glass-covered hill of ants; the salesman who raises goldfish in the back parlor and dreams of developing a new type of fantail to display at the annual fish show; the tanner who uses his daily walk to the tannery as his opportunity to learn the songs of the birds in every season of the year; the lumberman who hunts with a camera; the lawyer who collects carvings of elephants in every material and from every quarter of the globe: these are the men and women who have priceless gifts to give the children in our schools.

No one in the world is so generous with his enthusiasm as the amateur. You have to pay men to talk about their vocations, but it is hard to prevent them from talking about their hobbies. Our schools have not begun to realize the gold mine for the best kind of teaching which lies under their very doorstep. Every lover of a hobby is a potential teacher of the young. He can accomplish much with but meager pedagogical equipment. His enthusiasm surmounts the stumbling word and the material of his hobby counteracts any defect of presentation. Children can, under the inspiration of these rash adventurers upon sacred ground, develop hobbies of their own. Too long have the

specialists been allowed to preëmpt the happy hunting grounds and to frown the amateur away.

Think of our allowing the artists sole suzerainty in the field of art, when each one of us should be a joyous sketcher of the changing face of nature. Why should only the musically trained be expected to sing when every man's child of us can get pleasure out of near-harmonies and a sense of rhythm? Why should wood carving be confined to the specialists, when any hand can use a tool, and every human being feels joy in seeing a purposed shape emerge from a block of wood? The enthusiast, who spent the free hours of a busy life carving models of ancient ships, gained not only the enrichment that comes with any craftsmanship, but the additional joy of studying the sailing of the Seven Seas with "zeal and delight".

The physical directors in some of our colleges, alive to the justice of the criticism aimed at an over-preoccupation with the major sports, are training students in different types of physical recreation which are not dependent upon large numbers of fellow sportsmen for their performance, and which are designed not to end with the college days. The hope is to train young men who will no longer get their exercise and their fun sitting on the bleachers, but will find rowing, cross country runs, quoits, squash and volley ball, horseback riding, tennis, swimming, skating, skiing, adapted to undergraduate needs and suitable to carry on into middle age as some of the accessory joys of life.

Golf used to be regarded as the special possession of the adult and the safe amusement of the aged, but youth has seized it for itself, occupied the links, captured the prizes, and left age but a modest part to play. They have not yet robbed their elders, however, of the privilege of gardening. Mark Twain has called the garden the perfect enthusiasm for old age, since the most frail may hope to live to see the harvest gathered or the flowers come to bloom. The grower of orchids, the transplanter of cherry trees, the lover of the primula, the specialist in salad greens, the bulb fancier, the grafter of apple trees, will not find his idle hours hang heavy on his hands, for, winter and summer, with the hoe or the catalogue, he can share his joy in growing things with all the other enthusiasts from the Azores to Australia.