the most painful mental anguish, from losses and
shocks which almost unbalanced their minds, to be completely
revolutionized in their mental state by the suggestive power which came
from becoming absorbed in a great book.

Everywhere we see rich old men sitting around the clubs, smoking, looking
out of the windows, lounging around hotels, traveling about, uneasy,
dissatisfied, not knowing what to do with themselves, because they had
never prepared for this part of their lives. They put all their energy,
ambition, everything into their vocation.

I know an old gentleman who has been an exceedingly active business man.
He has kept his finger upon the pulse of events. He has known what has
been going on in the world during his whole active career. And he is now
as happy and as contented as a child in his retirement, because he has
always been a great reader, a great lover of his kind.

People who keep their minds bent in one direction too long at a time soon
lose their elasticity, their mental vigor, freshness, spontaneity.

If I were to quote Mr. Dooley, it would be:--"Reading is not thinking;
reading is the next thing this side of going to bed for resting the mind."

To my own mind, however, I would rather cite that versatile Englishman,
Lord Rosebery. In a speech at the opening of a Carnegie library at West
Calder, Midlothian, he made a characteristic utterance upon the value of
books, saying in substance:

"There is, however, one case in which books are certainly an end in
themselves, and that is to refresh and to recruit after fatigue. When
the object is to refresh and to exalt, to lose the cares of this world in
the world of imagination, then the book is more than a means. It is an
end in itself. It refreshes, exalts, and inspires the man. From any
work, manual or intellectual, the man with a happy taste for books comes
in tired and soured and falls into the arms of some great author, who
raises him from the ground and takes him into a new heaven and a new
earth, where he forgets his bruises and rests his limbs, and he returns
to the world a fresh and happy man."

"Who," asks Professor Atkinson, "can overestimate the value of good
books, those strips of thought, as Bacon so finely calls them, voyaging
through seas of time, and carrying their precious freight so safely from
generation to generation? Here are finest minds giving us the best
wisdom of present and past ages; here are the intellects gifted