For most young people, going to school is the great business of life.
Whatever ups and downs may occur in the family, they keep steadily on,
learning lessons, reciting them, getting merits and demerits, and
growing through it all as fast as they can toward the time when they
shall be men and women.
The ancients--who are so called because when they lived this old world
was young--had a wise saying about a sound mind in a sound body, which
fathers and mothers in these days seem to have quite forgotten, if they
ever heard it. Else how does it happen that Alice and Fanny, who never
have the least appetite in the morning, are permitted to go to school,
after a very slender breakfast, with a few cents in their pockets to buy
lunch; and that Walter and Howard, with their heads full of other
declensions, decline to take even so much as a sandwich, on the plea
that they have no time to eat at noon?
[Illustration: DISPOSING OF THE CANDY.]
Growing boys and girls need to eat if they are to be rosy, plump, and
strong. Yet we can not blame children for disliking the usual school
luncheon, which is seldom dainty-looking or inviting to the taste;
sandwiches roughly and thickly cut, the bread clumsily buttered, and the
meat in chunks instead of slices, cake crumbling and soggy, pickles, and
pie that has been wedged into a dinner box for hours, are none of them
the proper food for exhausted brains.
Of course, where it is possible, a run home between the morning and
afternoon sessions of school, and a nice luncheon at the prettily set
home table, with mamma smiling at the head, are the very best things to
keep children well. Many reasons combine to make this arrangement very
inconvenient, however, for most schools. The necessary prompt
re-assembling after the noon recess would be out of the question where
pupils live, as they frequently do, several miles distant from the
school building.
[Illustration: LUNCH-HOUR IN AN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.]
How would you like the idea of a school restaurant of your own, little
folks? On the bill of fare we would have every day nice hot soup, good
home-made bread, both white and brown, baked potatoes, apple sauce, rice
pudding, crisp celery, cold ham, and ripe fruit, served at the order of
the pupil-diner, at a daily cost of a few cents. We think there are
clever women who could manage such an enterprise so that it would pay
them very fair profits, and we are sure that if mammas and papas were
consulted, they would consider it an economy to have their children well
fed every day. It would save an immense amount in doctors' bills to some
households.
That wonderful machine, the human body, is not unlike a stove, in which
the fire will not keep on burning cheerily unless it is replenished from
time to time with fuel. Now the very worst fuel in the world for the
human stove is composed of pickles on the one hand, and creams and
confections on the other. If the brain is to perform its high offices as
it ought, the stomach must receive due attention.
After a comfortable luncheon at the school restaurant, we should advise
the boys and girls to petition for a half-hour of merry play
out-of-doors in pleasant weather. Snow-balling, coasting, and skating
would not be amiss, for after the rapid exercise the mind would return
to study not jaded and tired, but fresh and vigorous. In stormy weather
a dance or a half-hour of calisthenics would set the blood to merry
motion in the veins, and we would not see children coming home from
school at four irritable and cross, or so often hear the family doctor
say, "You must take that child from school."
We would just remind fathers and mothers that at present the only
children who are sure of a good dinner at noon are the little waifs who
go to the industrial schools, and for whom charity provides at least one
hearty meal a day.
[Illustration: MID-DAY DINNER IN THE SCHOOL RESTAURANT.--DRAWN BY MRS.
JESSIE SHEPHERD.]