sing with
pulley-weights for a minute or two, taking up dumb-bells and throwing
them down, swinging once or twice on parallel bars, and so frittering
away time and strength. Far better it would be for such people to stay
away from a gymnasium altogether, for their lack of purpose and
continuity makes them lose rather than gain muscular energy. A man or
woman who would gather strength from gymnastic exercise must set about it
systematically and with a will. He must put mind and energy into the
work, or else continue to have flabby muscles and an undeveloped body.

[Illustration: Julia Ward Howe]

The physical gymnasium differs only in kind from the mental one.
Thoroughness and system are as necessary in one as in the other. It is
not the tasters of books--not those who sip here and there, who take up
one book after another, turn the leaves listlessly and hurry to the
end,--who strengthen and develop the mind by reading.

To get the most from your reading you must read with a purpose. To sit
down and pick up a book listlessly, with no aim except to pass away time,
is demoralizing. It is much as if an employer were to hire a boy, and
tell him he could start when he pleased in the morning, work when he felt
like it, rest when he wanted to, and quit when he got tired!

Never go to a book you wish to read for a purpose, if you can possibly
avoid it, with a tired, jaded mentality. If you do, you will get the
same in kind from it. Go to it fresh, vigorous, and with active, never
passive, faculties. This practise is a splendid and effective cure for
mind-wandering, which afflicts so many people, and which is encouraged by
the multiplicity of and facility of obtaining reading matter at the
present day.

What can give greater satisfaction than reading with a purpose, and that
consciousness of a broadening mind that follows it, and growth, of
expansion, of enriching the life, the consciousness that we are pushing
ignorance, bigotry, and whatever clouds the mind and hampers progress a
little further away from us?

The kind of reading that counts, that makes mental fiber and stamina is
that upon which the mind is concentrated; approaching a book with all
one's soul intent upon its contents.

How few people ever learn to concentrate their attention. Most of us
waste a vast amount of precious time dawdling and idling. We sit or
stand over our work without thinking. Our minds are blank much of the
time.

Passive re