his favorite portions of Shakspeare a thousand times—­of the Bible a million times.  Reading is much more like painting than we think.  Go into a palace car.  Do you think this polish was put on the wood with one application of the brush—­with two, three, four?  No; it would possibly be cheaper to cover it with silk plush than to go over it as the skilled workmen have done.  Let us buy less ephemeral stuff, to be set adrift and stove in when we have skimmed over it.  Let us season our reading, polish it, grain it, varnish it, repolish it and revarnish it, until we are just like it ourselves—­clear, concise, intelligent.  How enjoyable it is to meet an intelligent person!

WHAT A CHARM

there is about a comrade who can understand what you say, and who can swap ideas with you “even Steven!” It cannot be done without books.

Considering the vast importance of learning in saving labor and reducing the actual cost of existence, there has been little growth in the business of bookmaking compared with what there should have been.  The trade in books in America is large, because the country is large.  Everything is large here.  Comparatively, however, it probably sinks below fishing for mackerel as an industry.  As it is now, a shockingly large portion of the industry such as it is is given over to costly bindings.  It does not seem that the people, even when they first had books, cared so much for the privilege of reading as they did for a gaudy covering to the volume, on which they could expend a barbaric love for ornament.  The wise men of those times marveled, just as the wise men marvel nowadays.  “Learning hath gained most by those books,” says Old Fuller, “by which the printers have lost.”  Our follies in the way of “books that are all binding” are almost microscopically small when put beside those of the olden times, when, one would think the art of printing, being new, would have been best appreciated, for surely the grass looks the greenest to us in the spring!  Let us do something more than

MAKE JEWELRY OUT OF THE ART OF GUTTENBERG.

“A book may be as great a thing as a battle,” said Disraeli, and he meant by that a decisive battle.  Now there are sometimes very decisive battles.  A Turk once came up against the walls of Vienna and the walls of Tours, in France, and, if he had got through, you and I would to-day, so the scholars say, be “good Mussulmans,” instead of Christians, living in freedom and decency.  “When a book,” says Bruyere, “raises your spirits, and inspires you with noble and courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the work by; it is good, and made by a good workman.”  The books you buy should have large clear type.  They are to be

YOUR COMPANIONS THROUGH LIFE.