Coasts, both cross country and in streets duly furnished with pungs, sleighs and a considerable number of funerals to turn out for. One theatre.

Pianos and violins.

Several barns with horses, cows, pigs and the smells appropriate thereto.

Add uncles who acted, sketched, read Shakespeare and other people aloud, sang and did other interesting stunts.

And one remarkable and sporting grandmother.

Joseph Lee writes of the play leadership he himself enjoyed:

"My brother, George Lee, did more for me, than any one else, more than I have ever known any one else to do for another. He practically undertook my education, giving me hundreds of boxing lessons and almost as many in rowing, and doing all he could to make a man of mea man's man, not a ladies' man. 'Running after girls,' he said, 'won't get you anywhere.' He was the greatest teacher I have ever known. Those events, whether in rowing or boxing, for which he trained me I won; those in which I trained myself I lost. He could, as few teachers can, give you intelligible instruction what to do. More important, he could see what was going on inside of you and how your full resources could be mobilized. And his aim was not the sport but character. George was my hero and that of many of us smaller boys, and as a modern Hercules his exploits justified our worship."

Joseph Lee always thought of conversation as a very important form of recreation. It was so easy for him to talk about "Alice in Wonderland," about Jane Austen and about all of the books that were dear to him. He wrote once of a three hour conversation in which he dimly awakened for the first time "to her powers of keen appreciation and of sustaining her part in that process of mutual discovery and enhancement which is the essence of conversation." He mentioned the great quality in any listener, the speaking countenance "where sympathy runs. before the thought and the face reflects more than you have said."

So much of Joseph Lee's power in conversation came from his reading, which he had so thoroughly digested that it had become a part of himself and was almost forgotten. On one

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occasion Joseph Lee talked back and forth with a friend for several hours on readings from Dante, and never had he seemed more completely to lose himself.

Reading out loud had a very important place in the Lee household. Joseph Lee mentioned the delights of having a cold, not too severe, for the opportunity it gave to be read to out loud from Trollope and Walter Scott. He writes that from the time of his marriage "we read over our two favorite series from Trollope and Miss Austen's novels as often as we thought decent." "Mrs. Lee read aloud almost every evening of our married life to me and to the children." Often Joseph Lee spoke of the delight which he had in remembering his father's reading out loud the plays of Shakespeare.

The whole Lee family at one period used to bicycle together over the week-ends at Cohasset. No one could walk with Joseph Lee back and forth on the beach of Cohasset and not be conscious of the extent to which the beauty of the beach and of the rocks and the ocean had entered into his very life, though he never uttered a word about it. Rowing, paddling in canoes have an important part in the Cohasset picture. Joseph Lee himself sailed as one of the crew of his brother, George Lee, but he himself never quite had the real thrill of sailing in full charge himself.

No one could fully understand Joseph Lee without knowing the Putnam Camp near Keene Valley in the Adirondacks. One could sense the depth of his feeling for the long walks, the "swishing of the swash," the singing around the camp fire.

Joseph Lee and his wife, Margaret Cabot Lee, were much influenced in their own family recreation life by their common knowledge of Froebel and their delight in him. Both had a keen intellectual grasp of Froebel's teaching and brought to it a depth of understanding.

One could not help feeling the richness of the play life which Joseph Lee and Mrs. Lee opened up to their children. Joseph Lee, Jr., was managing a canoe and rowing a skiff by himself at the age of five, and sailing a dory himself alone at the age of seven, although he was not allowed by himself out of his depth until he learned how to swim. The children were encouraged to climb trees and ladders, to perform innumerable stunts in spite of possible risks. The children too had bicycles as soon as they

could ride and managed their own expeditions from the time they were eleven years old. The house in Boston had a piazza 36′ x 12′ on the south side, opening with a French window on a level out of a little room next to the parlor, equipped with a sand box and an awning. In winter snow was piled on the sand box and a coast for a slide made, the coasting sometimes ending inside the little room. Mr. and Mrs. Lee saw to it that their children had the physical and social surroundings belonging to the full life of childhood without "waiting until they invented all these things themselves." Mrs. Lee sang and read to the children for hours every day and played the mother games and showed them others and "opened out to them in every way their whole inheritance from all the generations of happy childhood and from the child lore of the race."

Often the whole family walked together in the evening. Among the books which were read out loud to the children were Peter Rabbit and some of his successors, Kingsley's Heroes, Hawthorne's Wonder Book, Heidi, Pilgrim's Progress, Scott, Robin Hood, King Arthur. There were dramatizations in the parlor in the Boston home and out of doors at Cohasset in summer.

Each child was exposed to music to see if it would take. There was strong desire that the children should grow up to love the country and country life.

Joseph Lee himself had great pleasure in observing and noting little things. As he rode along on the train he would watch just what all the children were doing in their play. He liked after Board meetings and committee meetings in New York City to walk to the train and would constantly be stopping to observe the play of the children in the city streets. One could not soon forget the depth of his satisfaction in observing what was going on about him. Many times individuals thought that he was not ob

serving at all what was going on, when every detail had been carefully noted and could be accurately described later and with very great satisfaction by him. He could draw at will on his memory of little things enjoyed in the past.

Dr. Charles W. Eliot once referred to the Irish blood in Joseph Lee which made him always interesting in anything which he might say. It seemed just impossible for Joseph Lee to utter a dull sentence. Even his silences as he walked with one were somehow interesting.

For many years Joseph Lee never missed a Recreation Congress. At these Congresses, as the delegates danced and played together, he .entered whole-heartedly into the fun and no young man or young woman of 21 had a better time than he. At one Recreation Congress when Mr. Lee was about 50 years of age, many of the delegates themselves tried the physical efficiency tests and Joseph Lee was one of this number. He "chinned" himself six times, made a standing broad jump of six feet six inches and ran a sixty yard dash in eight seconds, thus qualifying for the second physical efficiency badge.

Throughout life music was most important to Mr. Lee. He would tell of the long hours of practicing on the piano two or three hours at a time. Bad music caused him acute distress.

Joseph Lee and his friends found great satisfaction in his drawings, in his charcoal sketches and water colors. He was so intense in his writing that perhaps one could not speak of writing as a form of recreation in the usually accepted sense of the word "recreation" but it was certainly an important part of the expression of Mr. Lee's life, of his own abundant living. Perhaps one reason why Joseph Lee cared so deeply for the "enduring satisfactions of life for all men, women and children" is because he himself lived so richly and so deeply.

there is one aspect of his character that has, it seems to me, not yet been touched: the fact that along with having established Playgrounds for the Childhood of America, becoming a distinguished and important member of society, yet he remained a person who, in his middle age and even in his later years, himself still loved to play.

Those of us who knew him as an older relative, or as the father of our friends, had a very special feeling about Joseph Lee. We knew he was a distinguished citizen, the aura of greatness always hung about him, but to us his public achievement did not matter. What mattered was that here was a Grown-Up who nevertheless loved to come out with us and 'do things,' and who 'did things' with a vim and an enthusiasm that carried us all along. To us he was an Opener of Gates.

I can see him in a small clearing in the Adirondack forest, a smooth, green place hedged in with arbor vitae, surrounded by a group of children, his own and others, dancing "The Farmer in the Dell" or "Roman Soldiers," coats off and pigtails flying. When others would have tired, it was his enthusiasm that kept on thinking of one tune after another, till the feet of even the shy ones were happily thumping the soft, cow-munched turf.

Or I see him stretched full length in the spring sunshine on the sand, or on his piazza floor at Cohasset, ready to talk philosophy with any comer, and this in an age before the sun had become the fashion, and when many a member of his generation disliked picnics because they necessitated sitting on the ground.

Or I see him, in the early winter, skating joyously on the first black ice on Hammond's Pond, and later in the winter on the River. Some bright, clear February morning one would be called up by one of his children, told that "Pa" had decided to go river-skating, and would

you come, and if you had something to do, would you please give it up and come anyway, because river-skating was important and you couldn't do it every day in the year, and you gave it up and you came. You skated ecstatically after the tall, lank figure, clad like as not in a long, black city overcoat and derby, but with a stout rope wound round his waist in case of danger, -Joseph Lee believed in teaching children to do dangerous things and do them wisely, and you scrambled up and stocking-footed across the roads and railroads to avoid the deep, black, open holes under the bridges.

I see him arrive late in the afternoon at a winter house-party in New Hampshire, and right after supper disappear out the door into the darkness, to be discovered an hour later by his lazy youngers ardently coasting, all by himself in the dim moonlight, steering his sled after the manner of his boyhood by jerking the runners and plowing the toes of his best Boston boots into the icy roadway. I can hear him telling, with the enthusiasm of a boy ten,-he was then over sixty,-how he had missed the waterbox at the corner by just one inch the last time ..

And in the springtime, there was canoeing. No idle drifting down stream for him: he always insisted on paddling upstream from the canoehouse at South Natick toward that swift water under the dam near where the Indians were buried, not to carry mildly across the little field and over the road into the mill dam, but to get her under the arches of the bridge and up through the frothy rapids to the little island under the dam itself. It always meant pulling off shoes, rolling up trousers, climbing overboard, and hauling her up by main force, and we watched while he waded, with utter forgetfulness, among the broken bottles of modern civilization. And when we went on a moonlight night, he wanted to stay late. And when we

lost the key of our Ford into the river, he was not annoyed.

To us who drove him about the country in Model

T. Fords, it seemed he knew the whole of Massachusetts in terms of trout brooks. "That," he would shout, almost precipitating himself over the Ford's side, "must be the brook where Emery Codman and I,-" and then would come a yarn of trout fishing, in a day when trout, apparently, could be caught in almost any stream from Brookline to the Berkshires. To us who drove him, those forgotten brooks, now rapidly disappearing into drain pipes, those blossoming swamps now filled with dead automobiles and tin cans, took on the poetry of the wilderness that still lingered about them in his own youth.

For Joseph Lee was an artist of great enthusiasm and no little skill. He could paint pictures in words, and he was always trying to paint pictures with real paints, and never quite satisfied with his results. I can see him with his back against some rounded Adirondack boulder, his khaki hat (he has been known to start for Washington to preside over a Playground Association Meeting in that same hat) well down over his brow, palette in hand, keen eyes squinting eagerly through his glasses at the shadows, whose colors he could not quite get. Or I can hear him asking that lunch be put

off for an hour because he was just going out sketching and he was sure he could not get the color of that grey stump in just one hour, and yet he could not bear to miss lunching with the crowd.

He loved a crowd and the give and take of minds in conversation. I can see him of an evening in a great armchair before a log fire, with young people perching on the chair's arms, or on the woodbox, or on the hearth below him, talking eagerly, or sometimes listening to others' talk, of 'Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, and Cabbages and Kings.'

Once in a while, as by a miracle, there comes an adult whose spirit bridges the inevitable chasm between the generations, a person to whom, even when one is young, one can talk as an equal and who, even though they have attained the wisdom of years, treat the young as though their opinions were worth while. It was this faculty that Joseph Lee had and that kept him young while others of his generation, —and of ours,—grew old. To those of us who knew him as we did the great thing was not that he established Playgrounds but that, having established Playgrounds, he nevertheless still loved to play.

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and holydays were these, for they have been spent with the two finest characters I have known. To spend even two of the 365 days of each year with human beings whose quite different characters you sincerely believe are well-nigh divine, does much to dispel the false values of human nature received from the headlines or from neighborhood gossip. For 30 years the opening day of the fishing season has been sacred to J. L. and for 40 years that of the hunting season to W. P. B. The lives of these men have been examples so far beyond my reach that I have felt no need of angels or divinities to guide me; nor do I wish to associate for eternity with beings more perfect. No one could crave a better world than this would be if peopled by such creatures.

To tell the truth, J. L. was no great fisherman, but he was a splendid companion on fishing trips. He was not the person to choose for a fishing trip "to-come-home-and-tell-the-officeabout;" he was no "go getter." Size and quality meant little to him unless relative to the geographic surroundings. A half-pound trout in a public brook within 15 miles of Boston was more of a prize than a three pounder in Maine. A bass from Jamaica Pond (within the Boston City limits) big enough to present to Commissioner Long, was more desirable than a salmon from some rich friend's preserve. He liked to fish in public streams or ponds, and to compete with those boys who had energy enough to take the same trouble. Had he so chosen, he might have belonged to the most exclusive fishing clubs, but he believed in holding most of our ponds and streams as public playgrounds, and was ready to work for his share of the fish. He really relished one occasion, when, after he had whipped a pool for some time with a variety of flies, a boy with a pole appeared on the opposite bank. Joe was rather indignant at first because, breaking all precedent, the boy stood up in plain sight of every fish in the pool, spoiling all chances of a trout rising to a fly. How

ever, J. L. accepted the inevitable, and conversed with the interloper across the twenty feet of water, while the boy's "barn yard hackle" lay on the bottom. Presently, in spite of the conversation, the boy pulled in his line with a ten inch trout attached. It was like Joe to console himself by saying that at any rate the trout's appetite had been aroused by his own flies, even if it preferred the boy's worm. The fact that this typical example of the classic tale occurred in a public brook less than fifteen miles from the state house, and within walking distance from the trolley, was what impressed him. Of course, he envied the boy, but enjoyed the experience; no doubt they both cherished the memory of it for the rest of their lives. However, J. L. had no thought of buying the exclusive rights on the brook to prevent further intrusion.

I had fished with him for some time before I could account for a peculiar sound which came from his direction now and then. A single sound, like the quack of a duck, if a duck ever did confine itself to one quack. As we usually fished a brook by an alternating method, each passing the other by circling through the woods or fields, when one reached the point where the other had started, we were generally near, but not in sight of one another. Occasionally came the quack from his direction, the cause of which I finally saw and heard at the same time. When rebaiting, he would put the wriggling worm in the palm of one hand, and give it a sharp blow with his other palm, making a single quack with which the worm had little, if anything, to do, except to be effectually stunned, stop wriggling, and be easily impaled on the hook. Joe's idea in stunning it was not for his own convenience when impaling it, but wholly on the worm's account. Surely, this shows his originality as well as his sympathy for the human, animal or helminthic under dog. I doubt if any other fisherman ever used this method, for most of us want the worm to squirm.

Stopping the wriggling did not seem to abate the desire of fish to take his bait, nevertheless,