. Its proud owner led me through a maze of smooth-trodden paths, and
pointed out a vast number of horticultural achievements. There were
sixty-seven varieties of dahlias, there were more than a hundred kinds
of roses, there were untold wonders which at last my weary brain refused
to record. Finally I escaped, exhausted, and sought refuge on a hillside
I knew, from which I could look across the billowing green of a great
rye-field, and there, given up to the beauty of its manifold simplicity,
I invited my soul.

It is even so with our reading. When I go into one of our public
reading-rooms, and survey the serried ranks of magazines and the long
shelves full of "Recent fiction, not to be taken out for more than five
days,"--nay, even when I look at the library tables of some of my
friends,--my brain grows sick and I long for my rye-field.

Happily, there always is a rye-field at hand to be had for the seeking.
Jonathan finds refuge from business and the newspapers in his pipe and
"The Virginians." I have no pipe, but I sit under the curling rings of
Jonathan's, and I, too, have my comfortable books, my literary
rye-fields. Last summer it was Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," whose book I
found indeed a comfortable one--most comfortable. I read much besides,
many short stories of surpassing cleverness and some of real excellence,
but as I look back upon my summer's literary experience, all else gives
place to the long pageant of Malory's story, gorgeous or tender or gay,
seen like a fair vision against the dim background of an old New England
apple orchard. Surely, though the literature of our library tables may
sometimes weary me, it shall never enslave me.

But they must be read, these "comfortable" books, in the proper fashion,
not hastily, nor cursorily, nor with any desire to "get on" in them.
They must lie at our hand to be taken up in moments of leisure, the
slowly shifting bookmark--there should always be a bookmark--recording
our half-reluctant progress. (I remember with what dismay I found myself
arrived at the fourth and last volume of Malory,) Thus read, thus
slowly woven among the intricacies and distractions of our life, these
precious books will link its quiet moments together and lend to it a
certain quality of largeness, of deliberation, of continuity.

For it is surely a mistake to assume, as people so often do, that in a
life full of distractions one should read only such things as can be
finished at a singl