at you have not rightly
systemized your hours. He knows that thousands of young men and women
whose lives are crowded to overflowing with routine work and duties,
manage to find time to keep posted on what is going on in the world,
and for systematic, useful reading.

Carlyle said that a collection of books is a university. What a pity
that the thousands of ambitious, energetic men and women who missed
their opportunities for an education at the school age, and feel
crippled by their loss, fail to catch the significance of this, fail to
realize the tremendous cumulative possibilities of that great
life-improver that admirable substitute for a college or university
education--reading.

"Of the things which man can do or make here below," it was said by the
sage of Chelsea, "by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy, are
the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink
on them; from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew Book, what have
they not done, what are they not doing?"

President Schurmann of Cornell, points with pride to a few books in his
library which he says he bought when a poor boy by going many a day
without his dinner.

The great German Professor Oken was not ashamed to ask Professor
Agassiz to dine with him on potatoes and salt, that he might save money
for books.

King George III, used to say that lawyers do not know so much more law
than other people; but they know better where to find it.

A practical working knowledge of how to find what is in the book world,
relating to any given point, is worth a vast deal from a financial
point of view. And by such knowledge, one forms first an acquaintance
with books, then friendship.

"When I consider," says James Freeman Clarke, "what some books have
done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope,
awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal of life to
those whose homes are hard and cold, bind together distant ages and
foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truths from
heaven,--I give eternal blessings for this gift."

For the benefit of the younger readers we give below a list of forty
juveniles.

Aesop's "Fables."

Louise M. Alcott's "Little Women," "Little Men," which stood at the top
of a list of books chosen in eleven thousand elementary class-rooms in
New York.

T. B. Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy."

Anderson's "Fairy Tales."

Amelia E. Barr's "The Bo