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.
[Illustration: 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.