.

In this way, I ignorantly fastened a habit upon me. I got like an
alcoholic, I could let no day go by without reading. As I grew older, I
couldn't pass a book-shop without going in. And in libraries, where
reading was free, I always read to excess. The people around me
glorified the habit (just as old songs praise drinking). I never had the
slightest suspicion that it might be a vice. I was as complacent over my
book totals as six bottle men over theirs.

[Illustration: Ak and the striped Wumpit--]

Can there ever have been a race of beings on some other star, so
fascinated as we are by reading? It is a remarkable appetite. It seems
to me that it must be peculiar to simians. Would you find the old folks
of any other species, with tired old brains, feeling vexed if they
didn't get a whole newspaper fresh every morning? Back in primitive
times, when men had nothing to read but knots in a string, or painful
little pictures on birch bark--was it the same even then? Probably Mrs.
Flint-Arrow, 'way back in the Stone Age pored over letters from her son,
as intensely as any one. "Only two knots in it this time," you can
almost hear her say to her husband. "Really I think Ak might be a little
more frank with his mother. Does it mean he has killed that striped
Wumpit in Double Rock Valley, or that the Gouly family where you told
him to visit has twins?"

[Illustration: maiden in distress]

There are one or two primitive ideas we still have about reading. I
remember in a boarding-house in Tucson, I once met a young clergyman,
who exemplified the belief many have in the power of books. "Here are
you," he would say to me, "and here is your brain. What are you going
to put into it? That is the question." I could make myself almost as
good as a bishop, he intimated, by choosing the noblest and best books,
instead of mere novels. One had only to choose the right sort of reading
to be the right sort of man.

[Illustration: Scenes of Horror]

He seemed to think I had only to read Socrates to make myself wise, or
G. Bernard Shaw to be witty.

Cannibals eat the hearts of dead enemy chieftains, to acquire their
courage; and this clergyman entered a library with the same simple
notion.

But though books are weak implements for implanting good qualities in
us, they do color our minds, fill them with pictures and sometimes
ideas. There are scenes of horror in my mind to-day that were put there
by Poe, or Ambrose Bierce or somebo