The costumes worn by these garden students are durable, appropriate and most becoming.  The school colors are the woodsy ones of brown and green, and the working garb is carried out in these colors.  Brown khaki or corduroy skirts, eight inches from the ground, with two large pockets, are worn under soft green smocks smocked in brown.  The sweaters are brown or green, and there is a soft hat for winter and a large shade hat for summer.  Heavy working gloves and boots are provided, and a large apron with pockets goes with the outfit.

All in all, you feel sure, as you go back down the “old Lime-Kiln road,” that the motto of the school will be fulfilled in the life of each of its students:  “So enter that daily thou mayst become more thoughtful and more learned.  So depart that daily thou mayst become more useful to thyself and to all mankind.”

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(Boston Transcript)

BOYS IN SEARCH OF JOBS

BY RAYMOND G. FULLER

One morning lately, if you had stood on Kneeland street in sight of the entrance of the State Free Employment Office, you would have seen a long line of boys—­a hundred of them—­waiting for the doors to open.  They were of all sorts of racial extraction and of ages ranging through most of the teens.  Some you would have called ragamuffins, street urchins, but some were too well washed, combed and laundered for such a designation.  Some were eagerly waiting, some anxiously, some indifferently.  Some wore sober faces; some were standing soldierly stiff; but others were bubbling over with the spirits of their age, gossiping, shouting, indulging in colt-play.  When they came out, some hustled away to prospective employers and others loitered in the street.  Disappointment was written all over some of them, from face to feet; on others the inscription was, “I don’t care.”

Two hundred boys applied for “jobs” at the employment office that day.  Half the number were looking for summer positions.  Others were of the vast army of boys who quit school for keeps at the eighth or ninth grade or thereabouts.  Several weeks before school closed the office had more than enough boy “jobs” to go around.  With the coming of vacation time the ratio was reversed.  The boy applicants were a hundred or two hundred daily.  For the two hundred on the day mentioned there were fifty places.

Says Mr. Deady, who has charge of the department for male minors:  “Ranging from fourteen to nineteen years of age, of all nationalities and beliefs, fresh from the influence of questionable home environment, boisterous and brimful of animation, without ideas and thoughtless to a marked degree—­this is the picture of the ordinary boy who is in search of employment.  He is without a care and his only thought, if he has one, is to obtain as high a wage as possible.  It is safe to say that of the thousands of boys who apply annually at the employment office, two-thirds are between sixteen and eighteen years of age.  Before going further, we can safely say that twenty per cent of the youngest lads have left school only a few weeks before applying for work.  Approximately sixty per cent have not completed a course in the elementary grammar schools.”