g thinner and
emptier. Do we not all know many people who seem to live in a mental
vacuum--to whom indeed, we have great difficulty in attributing
immortality because they apparently have so little life except that of
the body? Fifteen minutes a day of good reading would have given any
one of this multitude a really human life. The uplifting of the
democratic masses depends on this implanting at school of the taste
for good reading."

The great men of letters have usually been those who have been
accustomed to good books from the mother's knee. Where the taste for
reading has not been inherited it must be acquired by continuous
effort and some of the world's greatest achievements have been made by
men who toiled on in poverty and distress to improve their faculties.
There is no fact more uniformly evident in the biographies of great
men than that they read great books in youth. Nicolay and Hay say of
Abraham Lincoln:--

"When his tasks ended, his studies became the chief pleasure of his
life. In all the intervals of his work--in which he never took
delight, knowing well enough that he was born for something better
than that, he read, wrote, and ciphered incessantly. His reading was
naturally limited by his opportunities, for books were among the
rarest of luxuries in that region and time. But he read everything he
could lay his hands upon, and he was certainly fortunate in the few
books of which he became the possessor. It would hardly be possible to
select a better handful of classics for a youth in his circumstances
than the few volumes he turned with a nightly and daily hand--the
Bible, "Aesop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
a history of the United States, and Weem's "Life of Washington". These
were the best, and these he read over and over till he knew them
almost by heart. But his voracity for anything printed was insatiable.
He would sit in the twilight and read a dictionary as long as he could
see. He used to go to David Turnham's, the town constable, and devour
the "Revised Statutes of Indiana," as boys in our day do the "Three
Guardsmen." Of the books he did not own he took voluminous notes,
filling his copy-book with choice extracts, and poring over them until
they were fixed in his memory. He could not afford to waste paper upon
his original compositions. He would sit by the fire at night and cover
the wooden shovel with essays and arithmetical exercises, which he
would shave off an