d it was not the one I wanted.
Besides, it is the book that you own that most profits, not that one which
you take from "The Athenaeum" for a few days.

Excepting in rare cases, you might as well send to the foundling hospital
and borrow a baby as to borrow a book with the idea of its being any great
satisfaction. We like a baby in our cradle, but prefer that one which
belongs to the household. We like a book, but want to feel it is ours. We
never yet got any advantage from a borrowed book. We hope those never
reaped any profit from the books they borrowed from us, but never returned.
We must have the right to turn down the leaf, and underscore the favorite
passage, and write an observation in the margin in such poor chirography
that no one else can read it and we ourselves are sometimes confounded.

All success to great libraries, and skillful book-bindery, and exquisite
typography, and fine-tinted plate paper, and beveled boards, and gilt
edges, and Turkey morocco! but we are determined that frescoed alcoves
shall not lord it over common shelves, and Russia binding shall not
overrule sheepskin, and that "full calf" shall not look down on pasteboard.
We war not against great libraries. We only plead for the better use of
small ones.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

REFORMATION IN LETTER-WRITING.

We congratulate the country on the revolution in epistolary correspondence.
Through postal cards we not only come to economy in stamps, and paper, and
ink, and envelopes, but to education in brevity. As soon as men and women
get facility in composition they are tempted to prolixity. Hence some of us
formed the habit of beginning to read a letter on the second page, because
we knew that the writer would not get a-going before that; and then we were
apt to stop a page or two before the close, knowing that the remaining
portions would be taken in putting down the brakes.

The postal card is a national deliverance. Without the conventional "I take
my pen in hand," or other rigmarole--which being translated means, "I am
not quite _ready_ to begin just now, but will very soon"--the writer states
directly, and in ten or twenty words, all his business.

While no one can possibly have keener appreciation than we of letters of
sympathy, encouragement and good cheer, there is a vast amount of
letter-writing that amounts to nothing. Some of them we carry in our
pockets, and read over and over again, until they are worn out with
handling.