Few public schools are as yet prepared to provide lunches on their premises, though several successful experiments will encourage other towns and cities to do likewise. But for many children in city and country the distance from home is so great, or the school sessions so long, that the lunch basket is a necessity.

The child who spends most of his day in a school-room, not too well ventilated, requires a lunch very different from that he might take for an all day excursion in the open air. The food should be simple in quality and limited in quantity; there should not be a great variety in any one lunch, but throughout the week or month there should be constant change, that nothing becomes monotonous. Too often the lunch baskets are filled with sweetmeats rather than substantial articles of food, yet it is as easy to prepare the latter as the former, and to put them in attractive form.

The element of surprise will give relish to food that would be little appreciated otherwise, and may be managed by diplomacy on the part of the mother, or whoever packs the basket. Do not ask a child at the breakfast table what he will have for lunch, and then pack it before his eyes.

A lunch basket must be well aired over night; if napkins and crumbs are allowed to remain in it until the next day's lunch is packed, odors and flavors will invariably remain to affect the next food packed in the basket. Nor is it appetizing to have one article of food placed in such close neighborhood to another that one adheres to the other, or the flavors mingle. Paraffin paper wrapped around sandwiches and cakes will keep each distinct, moist, and in good shape.

It is quite possible to plan twenty different lunches and thus give a complete change every day in a month, and the order may be varied when the same articles are used a second time.

Almost endless changes may be made in the filling of a sandwich. A cup custard is digestible and nourishing if not overcooked; simple puddings may be cooked in cups, and thus be in convenient form for the lunch basket. Fruit, raw or cooked, is always in order, even in cold weather; canned fruits are carried easily in a jelly tumbler; milk or lemonade may be packed in a flask or wide-mouthed bottle with a screw top. Let the child have a special spoon, which is put back in the basket as soon as washed, then it is always ready and the family spoons do not get scattered.

The lunches suggested will serve to show how great a variety may be obtained from ordinary materials.

1. Corned beef, graham muffins, buns, milk.

2. Egg sandwiches, wafers, glass of canned fruit.

3. Buttered rolls, Dutch cheese, chocolate cake.

4. Sliced ham, bread and butter, ginger cookies, baked apple.

5. Fishballs, Graham Bread, Bananas.

6. Cheese Sandwich, Cookies, Apples.

7. Cold roast beef, bread and butter, molasses gingerbread.

8. Potato Salad, Rolls, Cup Custard.

9. Sandwiches (deviled ham), pickles, rice pudding. 10. Tongue, rolls, apple turnovers.