SWIMMING HOLES 313 
temporarily out of commission; and when the water evap- 
orates, its effect is cooling on the cow’s skin. 
The song-birds, also, have their bathing places. We 
walk up asmall rivulet on a hot day, and cautiously approach 
its pools, and there we find the robins and the sparrows 
and other birds at their aquatic sports. Standing singly or 
by twos and threes in the shoal water, they create a great 
shower with the flutter of their wings. And this they do at 
great personal risk; for cats and other enemies may be 
lurking in the shrubbery 
that grows beside the 
pools. Oneof the ways 
to conserve the birds 
is to provide them with 
safe water fountains. 
Man is imitative far 
beyond every other 
creature, and especially 
so in youth. It is 
natural, therefore, that 
Fas gee: Svateny birds’ bath on a pond: out he should enter the 
water and try to do 
there, even though clumsily, what he sees other creatures 
doing. Once in the new medium, and used to its coolness 
and its buoyancy, the boy begins to try the tricks of the 
swimming-things about him. The dog swims in one way, 
and he imitates that. The frog swims in another way, and 
he imitates that. And then he begins to invent new ways 
of his own. 
The greatest social center in Boyville is the swimming 
hole. Its popularity is undoubted. Its resources are in- 
exhaustible. It is democratic beyond most of our institu- 
tions. It isn’t much of a place to look at, as a rule—just a 
bit of open water, a pond, or a pool in the creek, with broad 
