h rarer than one
would suppose until he seeks for them with the child. The first
requisite of a book is that it should interest the child, the next is
that it should inspire and uplift him. The imparting of information is
less important, but whatever information the book contains should be
accurate and useful. When a child has learned to appreciate those
classics which are suited to his comprehension he will not be likely
to waste his time on such futile things as tales of imaginary
adventure thickened with a little inaccurate history. He will prefer
books which describe what really happened to those which tell what
someone writing long after thinks possibly might have happened.

We have a good deal of nervous prostration now-a-days but little
refining leisure. Shorter days of labor give more spare time and the
schools can render a great service to the nation by teaching how to
make the best use of this time and by creating the desire to devote a
part of it to the reading of good books and especially to the reading
of the American classics. How few resources most persons have in
themselves and how flat and unprofitable their lives are. They devote
their moments of leisure to killing time, when association with the
right reading in early life would have taught them to cultivate that
inward eye which has been called the bliss of solitude. He who has a
love of reading, however limited his means or however restricted his
opportunities may give himself, if he will, a good education. He, who
has a taste for good books in youth, will rarely read anything else in
maturer years.

"From the total training during childhood," says President Eliot,
"there should result in the child a taste for interesting and
improving reading, which should direct and inspire its subsequent
intellectual life. That schooling which results in this taste for good
reading, however, unsystematic or eccentric the schooling may have
been, has achieved a main end of elementary education; and that
schooling which does not result in implanting this permanent taste has
failed. Guided and animated by this impulse to acquire knowledge and
exercise his imagination through reading, the individual will continue
to educate himself all through life. Without that deep-rooted
impulsion he will soon cease to draw on the accumulated wisdom of the
past and the new resources of the present, and as he grows older, he
will live in a mental atmosphere which is always growin