ch day, just to keep it sweet and good.

Perhaps you will think I am always wanting you to read, and you would like
to remind me that there are many other commendable pursuits. I certainly
am rather of the opinion Lowell expresses in "Democracy." He says,
"Southey, in his walk one stormy day, met an old woman, to whom, by way
of greeting, he made the rather obvious remark that it was dreadful
weather. She answered, philosophically, that, in her opinion, 'any sort of
weather was better than none!'" I should be half inclined to say that any
reading was better than none.

Yet you are quite right about those other pursuits, and I hope you will
follow them; but at the same time, if you have not already got a taste for
reading, it is the most important of all tastes for you to strive to
acquire, as it is very doubtful if you will manage otherwise to do so in
later life. I should pity you terribly if you failed to acquire it, for
you will all find life hard in one way or another, and you will find that
a love of reading is even more valuable than a sense of humour in helping
you over rough places. And--over and above the minor, more "worldly"
support of its power of amusing and interesting you, even in the most "set
grey life"--it is linked to those higher helps, without which, neither
reading nor anything else will do us much good. St. Hugh of Lincoln made
much of good books because he said they "made illness and sorrow
endurable," and, besides this, they save you from many temptations. It has
been well said, "It is very hard for a person who does not like reading to
talk without sinning.... Reading hinders castle-building, which is an
inward disease, wholly incompatible with devotion.... Towards afternoon a
person who has nothing to do drifts rapidly away from God. To sit down in
a chair without an object is to jump into a thicket of temptation. A
vacant hour is always the devil's hour. Then a book is a strong tower,
nay, a very church, with angels lurking among the leaves."

But although I must allow reading to be my special hobby,--one, however,
which is run very hard in my affections by both cooking and
gardening,--still I quite appreciate other hobbies, and I should be quite
as much pleased next term if, instead of telling me about books read and
bringing me a piece of poetry learnt (by-the-by, I do very much wish you
would all learn Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty" during the holidays)--if,
instead of this, you showed me col