for yourselves; for, if you run and play too hard right after dinner,
you are very soon out of breath, and if you keep up the exercise, you
are quite likely to have an attack of indigestion or stomach ache. If
you sit down to study directly after a meal, you soon feel heavy and
lazy, and what you read doesn't seem clear to you, and in a little
while you probably have a headache and an unpleasant taste in your
mouth. If you try to do two important things like digestion and hard
work with your brain or the muscles of your arms and legs at the same
time, you will be very likely to do both of them badly.

Even if you have studying to do at night, it will be much better for
you to spend half an hour or an hour in laughing and chatting, or in
reading some good story, or in playing some of the many pleasant
parlor games that rest you instead of tiring you, before you settle
down to your books. You will find that when you do start to work, you
get your lessons much more quickly and easily than if you had started
in after eating.

Perhaps your sister is just waiting to show you that girls can play
checkers better than boys can--"So there!" Or some of your friends
have come in for a game of dominoes or authors or snap or parcheesi or
stage coach or pussy-wants-a-corner, or to try that new song you
learned last week; and you will be surprised how quickly the time
flies away and bedtime or study hour comes.

Most evenings, however, you will probably get out your favorite
magazine, or that good story that you are reading, and you will all
sit around the big lamp on the center table and go off on adventures
to the uttermost parts of the earth, with the best and most lasting
friends that you will ever make--friends who will never grow tired of