or woman uses as instruments of a profession—­law books, medical books, cookery books, and the like.  I am not speaking of these, for they are not properly “books” at all; they come in the category of time-tables, telephone directories, and other useful agencies of civilized life.  I am speaking of books that are meant to be read.  Personally, granted that these books are decent and healthy, the one test to which I demand that they all submit is that of being interesting.  If the book is not interesting to the reader, then in all but an infinitesimal number of cases it gives scant benefit to the reader.  Of course any reader ought to cultivate his or her taste so that good books will appeal to it, and that trash won’t.  But after this point has once been reached, the needs of each reader must be met in a fashion that will appeal to those needs.  Personally the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.

Of course each individual is apt to have some special tastes in which he cannot expect that any but a few friends will share.  Now, I am very proud of my big-game library.  I suppose there must be many big-game libraries in Continental Europe, and possibly in England, more extensive than mine, but I have not happened to come across any such library in this country.  Some of the originals go back to the sixteenth century, and there are copies or reproductions of the two or three most famous hunting books of the Middle Ages, such as the Duke of York’s translation of Gaston Phoebus, and the queer book of the Emperor Maximilian.  It is only very occasionally that I meet any one who cares for any of these books.  On the other hand, I expect to find many friends who will turn naturally to some of the old or the new books of poetry or romance or history to which we of the household habitually turn.  Let me add that ours is in no sense a collector’s library.  Each book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it.  We could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much interested in their insides.

Now and then I am asked as to “what books a statesman should read,” and my answer is, poetry and novels—­including short stories under the head of novels.  I don’t mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry.  If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry.  He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.  Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin, Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke—­why! there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in