icely kept vegetable gardens are almost as pretty as
flower gardens. If you cannot mow the lawn, you can at least cut the
long grass on the edges; and that makes such a difference! It is
wonderful how much boys and girls can do in making and keeping a city
really beautiful.

I hope that you have plenty of room to play in now. Of course, when
you grow up, you will see that there are plenty of playgrounds and
parks for the children. We are beginning to find out that the richest
and the most beautiful city is the one whose streets are lined with
families of happy, rosy-cheeked children. So, you see, the "City
Beautiful" is the one that takes best care of her children, and she
can do this only by keeping her streets and houses perfectly clean and
seeing that the food her people get is fresh and good, and their
drinking water pure. If the city or town you live in is not like this,
be sure you do your very best to make it better.

[Illustration: WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE A BACK YARD LIKE THIS?]

[Illustration: OR LIKE THIS?]

There is one great evil that for hundreds and hundreds of years has
been known wherever people are crowded together, and even in the open
country, too; and which has been the cause of more untidiness and
uncleanliness and unhappiness and disease than any other evil ever
known. And that is the drinking of alcohol. People don't drink clear
alcohol, but they can get a great deal of it--enough to poison them
badly--in the fermented drinks you learned about some time ago.

In the days when your grandfather was a little boy, every man thought
that ale and wine and whiskey were good foods for him when he was
well; and good medicine when he was sick. He believed that they gave
him an appetite, and increased his strength. But now we have found, by
carefully studying the effects of alcohol, in laboratories and in
hospitals, that these beliefs were almost entirely mistaken. We know
that all that wine, beer, and whiskey do is to make people feel better
for a little while, without making them actually stronger or better in
any way. In fact, in most respects these drinks make them weaker and
worse instead.

Perhaps you will ask, "How do whiskey and wine and beer do us harm?"
And here is only part of the answer: (1) They tire the heart and, by
enlarging the blood pipes in the skin, make the heart pump too much of
the blood out to the skin. In this way they make a person feel warmer
when he really is not any