ch a little town, with
its saloons and automatics and flannel-shirted hero, stares at us every
month from the pages of popular magazines. But perhaps your little mining
town is dry, perhaps there has not been a shooting fray in it for ten
years, and all the young men go to Bible class on Sunday. Well, here is
something new; let us have it. Is New York your home? The magazines tell
you that New York is parceled out among a score of writers: the Italian
quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Syrian quarter, the boarding-houses, Wall
Street. What is there left? The suburbs? Surely not; and yet have you ever
seen a story of just your kind of street and just the kind of people that
you know? If not, here is your opportunity.

You have read about sailors, fishermen, farmers, detectives, Italian
fruit-peddlers, Jewish clothes-merchants, commercial travelers, financiers,
salesmen and saleswomen, doctors, clergymen, heiresses, and men about town,
but have you often read a thrilling romance of a filing clerk? How about
the heroism of a telephone collector? the humors of a street-car conductor?
The seeing eye will find material in the street car, in the department
store, in the dentist's waiting room, in college halls, on a lonely country
road--anywhere and everywhere. And the seeing eye is cultivated by a
perpetual process of comparing life as it is with life as it is portrayed
in literature and in art. In other words, to get material to write about,
you must cultivate alertness to the nature and value of your own
life-experience, and to the nature and value of all forms of life with
which you come into contact; but this you can never do with any degree of
success unless you at the same time learn how to read.

You may say that you know how to read. It is almost certain that you do
not. If by reading you mean that you can run your eye over a page, and,
barring a word here and there, get the general drift of the sense, you may
perhaps qualify as able to read. If you are set the task of interpreting
fully every phrase in an article by a thoughtful writer, the chances are
that you will fail. When only a small part of a writer's meaning has passed
from his mind to yours, you can hardly be said to have read what he has
written. On the other hand, no one can get out of written words all that
was put into them. What was written out of one man's experience must be
interpreted by another's experience; and as no two people ever have exactly
the