stories is beneath his dignity. Such
is not the case. There is a great abundance of literature that is manly,
and at the same time interesting to a boy. If the father feels that he
is past the time when he has any sympathy with the fairy stories and the
little poems that the infants like, if he thinks the nursery rhymes are
silly and the fables too old to be true, that is because he has not
recently read them. Busy men, men of power and influence, like to renew
their youth by going to the simple things they loved as children, and
not a few of them find that the years have given them new powers of
interpretation and that what was to them at one time only an amusing
tale is now replete with the philosophy of the universe. Yet there may
be fathers of so practical a mind that works of imagination have no hold
upon them. To them, however, the world of literature is by no means
barren. There are history, biography and essays upon a thousand
subjects, any one of which will interest a boy and at the same time his
father. Particularly is this true when the reading is aloud and
interspersed with free conversation upon the subjects that come to the
surface. If the father can only select the right material and read it
with his son there is no question whatever about the interest that will
develop for both. A busy man has little time to select reading; in all
probability he has not had the experience to enable him to do so wisely,
for he has been so absorbed in business that he has forgotten what he
knew best as a boy and is unable to tell just what appealed to him most.
It may be that he never in his youth had the opportunity to read the
best of literature and does not know where to turn to find it. He hears
his little family talking about what they read at school and how they
ought to read and feels himself behind the times and hesitates to make
an exhibition of himself before his children. To any father, a
collection such as that in _Journeys Through Bookland_ is of inestimable
value. When it is considered that in addition to the literary material
there are abundant suggestions as to how interest may be created and how
the reading may be made most profitable, then the set becomes
indispensable. In other words, _Journeys_ contains the material that
must be in every family to make it "fairly well furnished with books,"
and it provides a way of "mastering the books so that every valuable
thought is a familiar friend."

If fathers co