the sand-piles where the children are. swarming like ants will make it unnecessary for him to study the hundred other features to be satisfied. A final and conclusive proof will come to this individual when he steps from the cool, clean, wellventilated school-house into the hot, paved streets of ill-smelling neighborhoods, which but for the school oases would be the only playing-place of the thousands of his little "fellow-citizens." The cost of this substitute, exclusive of wear and tear on property, is something less than ten cents per day per child.

The next experiment, school baths, came from the inside, and was looked upon as very radical. Miles M. O'Brien, formerly President of the Board, determined in 1901 to put shower-baths into the schools for the use of pupils during school hours, and for the general public at other times. Considerable scholastic opposition was aroused, and, as a compromise, but one bath, that in School No. 1, near Chatham Square, was ordered. On a hot July day, when it was noon by the asphalt if not by the missing town-pump, the showers devised by Superintendent of School Buildings C. B. J. Snyder were formally opened. There were no speeches, however. President O'Brien helped the youngsters, who previously had fought to

get in, to undress, and then turned the water on twenty-five as dirty urchins as one ever saw. In ten minutes grimy bodies were snow white, not pink, for the underfed children of New York City are normally pale. When the records showed three and four hundred baths a day, this experiment was called a necessity. The baths have been ordered opened on Sunday mornings this year, and within a few weeks nine more schools in bathless neighborhoods will be equipped with ample baths for both sexes.

Having helped itself somewhat in getting fuller use out of its plant, the Board of Education started in to help other departments. The Commissioners sought permission from other Boards and installed teachers and kindergartners in the parks, on the recreation piers, and in the openair gymnasia. Swimming teachers were provided at the free floating baths. Then the Board borrowed vacant lots, tops of buildings, and settlement yards, and manned or rather womanned them with a corps of instructors. Sketching classes and athletic teams were taken to distant parks, and as a finale one year ten thousand pupils were loaded on steamboats and excursion barges and given a day's outing at some water-side park.

All of these things accomplished were

well enough in their way, but Mayor Low still was not satisfied. "Open more schools more of the time for more purposes for more people. Keep them open after school hours, on Saturdays, on Sundays, in summer, for play-places, for concerts, for meetings of citizens. You tell us how to do this, up at the Board of Education. We'll give the money, down at City Hall." These are not the Mayor's own words, but they are a good summary of his intentions. As soon as financial support thus was guaranteed by the Mayor, the Board of Education, under the lead of Mr. Burlingham, with whom play-schools are a hobby, adopted within a fortnight a number of plans which had been under consideration by the several committees for many weeks. First of these was the resolution to open twenty or thirty additional summer playgrounds to add their attendance to the present enrollment of seventy thousand, and to care for the overflow in Brooklyn. The next proposition offered by the Committee on Special Schools and Care of Buildings, of which Felix M. Warburg and ex-State Senator Charles L. Guy are chairmen respectively, startled the Board to some extent. These committees actually proposed to let the Public Education Association give a series of select free concerts on six successive

Sunday evenings in the West Twentyeighth Street Public School. Some of the members feared a dangerous precedent which would open the schools to the use of all sorts of organizations. The supporters of the plan answered that that would be most desirable. Finally the Board swallowed outside management, Sunday opening, and all, and sanctioned the plan, with the single reservation that the Department of Education should have supervisory control.

With the Sunday question settled, General George W. Wingate found it an easy matter to put through a resolution for the Lecture Committee, instructing Supervisor Henry M. Leipziger to establish on Sunday nights in crowded districts courses of lectures on historical, ethical, and æsthetic topics. At the same time it was determined to give lectures on sanitation and government in the Yiddish and Italian tongues, for the benefit of the first generation of naturalized Americans, to whom English is not easily intelligible.

All of these innovations, which will result in the opening of hundreds of schoolhouses for many extra hours each year, cost money. If the Board's perfected plans are carried out, the cost probably will be in the neighborhood of $250,000 per annum. This sum, however, will provide, in addition to the activities already specified, for the opening regularly of one school-house in each of the forty-six districts, as meeting-places for parents' leagues, mothers' clubs, literary societies, and other serious gatherings. In this way the schools will become, it is believed, the social centers of many of the neighborhoods a condition which, besides conferring direct benefit on those who use the facilities, will be of service indirectly to the school system, in stimulating a stronger interest in school affairs on the part of the parents of pupils. After all, however, to return to the text, the important achievement lies in the fact that the city of New York has succeeded in utilizing for nearly twice as much time school property worth probably twenty-five million. dollars. This has been done at a cost of about one per cent. per year on this valuation.

In conclusion, it must be remembered that all that is necessary to make any other city's name figure as the possessor of this fine sense of husbandry is action by the city officers. With minor modifications to suit particular cases, these ideas are easily adaptable for the saving of public money, both in populous communities and in hamlets. Let the selectmen of a village ask themselves if their two-thousand-dollar school-house is giving all the return possible. Other questions will follow quickly: "Are the children allowed to use the school-yard after hours?" "Are the literary societies encouraged to meet there?" "Is the local temperance society given any opportunity to combat the saloon and corner lounging-place through the medium of the school-house as a center of social activity?" In the country there may be no need to offer substitutes for "stuss" room and cider "stube" as in New York, but every place has features which are not as good as the best. There is no reason why the school-house should be idle and force the churches and the police to do all the night work.

R

ANCH life was once an adventure;

now it is a business. The glamour that surrounded the long trips over the trail from the open range to the shipping station, four hundred miles away, is no more. The typical cowboy who rode up the street of the cattle town, shooting revolvers and yelling that he was a "bad man," has passed into history. Even the "round-up" has lost some of its fiercer characteristics, and the owner of great herds, instead of wearing a broad-brimmed hat, trousers stuffed into the tops of high boots, with other accouterments indicating that he is tough," is more likely to sport a well-tied four-in-hand, patent-leather shoes, and adorn his fancy vest front with a watch-charm indicating that he has taken thirty-two degrees in the most exclusive secret society on earth. The business of cattle production has extended until it is not a venture nor a speculation, but an enterprise with far-reaching influences and with demands on the East as well as on the West.

The cattle ranch of to-day differs most from that of old in that it has metes and

bounds. Barbed-wire fences have made it possible for cattle syndicates to know where their herds graze. Not all of them are on fenced land, and-what is more notable-not all of the fenced land is owned by the men who use it. In the Southwest that vast open plain including western Texas, western Oklahoma, eastern New Mexico, and parts of Arizona and Kansas-the cattleman who owns one-fourth of the land he has fenced thinks he is doing fairly well. In whole counties. not more than twenty-five per cent. is either owned or leased by the users. The remainder? Some of it is Government land, free range; some is owned by Eastern investors who took it under mortgage in the boom times; some belongs to the county because taxes have not been paid.

The character of the stock has changed as well as that of the land tenure and the methods of doing business. For twenty years there has been going on in the range country a process of improvement, an upbuilding of the herds through the importation of better stock and the "selection of the fittest" in the develop