to most if not any other agencies for the
happiness and improvement of a community.

ANDREW CARNEGIE.

TO TEACHERS

Libraries are established that they may gather together the best of the
fruits of the tree of human speech, spread them before men in all
liberality and invite all to enjoy them. The schools are in part
established that they may tell the young how to enjoy this feast. They
do this. They teach the young to read. They put them in touch with
words and phrases; they point out to them the delectable mountains of
human thought and action, and then let them go. It is to be lamented
that they go so soon. At twelve, at thirteen, at fourteen at the most,
these young men and women, whose lives could be so broadened, sweetened,
mellowed, humanized by a few years' daily contact with the wisest,
noblest, wittiest of our kind as their own words portray them--at this
early age, when reading has hardly begun, they leave school, and they
leave almost all of the best reading at the same time. If, now, you can
bring these young citizens into sympathy with the books the libraries
would persuade them to read; if you can impress upon them the reading
habit; then the libraries can supplement your good work; will rejoice in
empty shelves; will feel that they are not in vain; and the coming
generations will delight, one and all, in that which good books can
give; will speak more plainly; will think more clearly; will be less
often led astray by false prophets of every kind; will see that all men
are of the one country of humanity; and will--to sum it all--be better
citizens of a good state.

I believe you will find there is something yet to do in reading in which
the library can be of help. Reading comes by practice. The practice
which a pupil gets during school hours does not make him a quick and
skilful reader. There is not enough of it. If you encourage the reading
habit, and lead that habit, as you easily can, along good lines, your
pupils will gain much, simply in knowledge of words, in ability to get
the meaning out of print, even though we say nothing of the help their
reading will give them in other ways.

J. C. DANA.

RIGHT USE OF BOOKS

When we consider how much the education that is continued after
schooltime depends upon the right use of books, we can hardly be too
emphatic in asserting that something of that use should be learned in
the school. Yet almost nothing of the sort really is learned. The
averag