WORK VUIiSUS PLAY. 71 



WORK VERSUS PLAY. 



HOW ANTS AND OTHER ANIMALS WORK. 



I remember, when a schoolboy, building a brick 

 house, and few recollections of my boyhood days 

 linger as pleasantly in my memory as this one. Sev- 

 eral of us had obtained the privilege of using the 

 corner of a brickyard in the village. We had our 

 own clay mill, properly dug, in which we prepared 

 our "■malm" or mud, with which we filled our 

 molds, the moist clay properly mixed with sand that 

 went into the molds as mud but came out as bricks, 

 delightfully firm and shapely, with true-cut edges 

 and sharp corners. These had to be set on edge to 

 dry, and when dry built into kilns and baked. 



Few brickmakers, I fancy, worked harder or more 

 faithfully than we did; and for what? The bricks 

 we made, which were two thirds the size of ordinary 

 bricks, were worthless except as playthings. We were 

 paid no wages, and certainly, because our work soiled 

 our boots and clothes, to say nothing of our faces and 

 hands, we received no praise or commendation for 

 what we did. Our only pay was the dehght we had 

 in making our own bricks and building our own play- 

 house. It was the delight of doing — of doing work ; 

 no one ever would call it labor ; we certainly never 

 thouo-ht of it as such, any more than we did " tag," 

 " I spy," ball, or any of our games. Properly 



