f successful robbery and murder have never before been equaled. Price
five cents." The next morning, Dr. Clark read in a newspaper of that
city that seven boys had been arrested for burglary, and four stores
broken into by the "gang." One of the ringleaders was only ten years
old. At their trial, it appeared that each had invested five cents in
the story of border crime. "Red-eyed Dick, the Terror of the Rockies,"
or some such story has poisoned many a lad's life. A seductive,
demoralizing book destroys the ambition unless for vicious living. All
that was sweet, beautiful, and wholesome in the character before seems
to vanish, and everything changes after the reading of a single bad
book. It has aroused the appetite for more forbidden pleasures, until
it crowds out the desire for everything better, purer, healthier.
Mental dissipation from this exciting literature, often dripping with
suggestiveness of impurity, giving a passport to the prohibited; this
is fatal to all soundness of mind.

A lad once showed to another a book full of words and pictures of
impurity. He only had it in his hands a few moments. Later in life he
held high office in the church, and years afterward told a friend that
he would have given half he possessed had he never seen it.

Light, flashy stories, with no intention in them, seriously injured the
mind of a brilliant young lady, I once knew. Like the drug fiend whose
brain has been stupefied, her brain became completely demoralized by
constant mental dissipation. Familiarity with the bad, ruins the taste
for the good. Her ambition and ideas of life became completely
changed. Her only enjoyment was the excitement of her imagination
through vicious books.

Nothing else will more quickly injure a good mind than familiarity with
the frivolous, the superficial. Even though they may not be actually
vicious, the reading of books which are not true to life, which carry
home no great lesson, teach no sane or healthful philosophy, but are
merely written to excite the passions, to stimulate a morbid curiosity,
will ruin the best of minds in a very short time. It tends to destroy
the ideals and to ruin the taste for all good reading.

Read, read, read all you can. But never read a bad book or a poor
book. Life is too short, time too precious, to spend it in reading
anything but the best.

Any book is bad for you, the reading of which takes away your desire
for a better one.

Many pe