astronomers and naturalists, and biologists."

The very atmosphere that radiates from and surrounds the mother is the
inspiration and constitutes the holy of holies of family life.

"In my mother's presence," said a prominent man, "I become for the time
transformed into another person."

How many of us have felt the truth of this statement!  How ashamed we
feel when we meet her eyes, that we have ever harbored an unholy
thought, or dishonorable suggestion!  It seems impossible to do wrong
while under that magic influence.  What revengeful plans, what thoughts
of hatred and jealousy, have been scattered to the four winds while in
the mother's presence!  Her children go out from communion with her
resolved to be better men, nobler women, truer citizens.

"How many of us have stood and watched with admiration the returning
victor of some petty battle, cheering until we were hoarse, exhausting
ourselves with the vehemence of our enthusiasm," says a writer, "when
right beside us, possibly touching our hand, was one greater than he?
One whose battle has not been petty--whose conflict has not been of
short duration, but has for us fought many a severe fight.

"When we had the scarlet fever or diphtheria and not one would come
near us, who held the cup of cold water to our fever-parched lips?  Who
bent over us day and night and fought away with almost supernatural
strength the greatest of all enemies--death?  The world's greatest
heroine--Mother!  Who is it that each Sunday dinner-time chose the neck
of the chicken that we might have the juicy wing or breast or leg?  Who
is it stays home from the concert, the social, the play, that we may go
with the others and not be stinted for small change?  Who is it
crucifies her love of pretty clothes, her desire for good things, her
longing for pleasure that we may have all these?  Who is it?  Mother!"

The greatest heroine in the world is the mother.  No one else makes
such sacrifices, or endures anything like the suffering that she
uncomplainingly endures for her children.

What is the giving of one's life in battle or in a wreck at sea to save
another, in comparison with the perpetual sacrifice of many mothers of
a living death lasting for half a century or more?  How the world's
heroes dwindle in comparison with the mother heroine!  There is no one
in the average family, the value of whose services begins to compare
with those of the mother, and yet there is no one who is more generally
neglected or taken advantage of.  She must remain at home evenings, and
look after the children, when the others are out having a good time.
Her cares never cease.  She is responsible for the housework, for the
preparation of meals; she has the children's clothes to make or mend,
there is company to be entertained, darning to be done, and a score of
little duties which must often be attended to at odd moments, snatched
from her busy days, and she is often up working at night, long after
every one else in the house is asleep.

No matter how loving or thoughtful the father may be, the heavier
burdens, the greater anxieties, the weightier responsibilities of the
home, of the children, usually fall on the mother.  Indeed, the very
virtues of the good mother are a constant temptation to the other
members of the family, especially the selfish ones, to take advantage
of her.  They seem to take it for granted that they can put all their
burdens on the patient, uncomplaining mother; that she will always do
anything to help out, and to enable the children to have a good time;
and in many homes, sad to say, the mother, just because of her
goodness, is shamefully imposed upon and neglected.  "Oh, mother won't
mind, mother will stay at home."  How often we hear remarks like this
from thoughtless children!

It is always the poor mother on whom the burden falls; and the pathetic
thing is that she rarely gets much credit or praise.

Many mothers in the poor and working classes practically sacrifice all
that most people hold dearest in life for their children.  They
deliberately impair their health, wear themselves out, make all sorts
of sacrifices, to send a worthless boy to college.  They take in
washing, go out house-cleaning, do the hardest and most menial work, in
order to give their boys and girls an education and the benefit of
priceless opportunities that they never had; yet, how often, they are
rewarded only with total indifference and neglect!

Some time ago I heard of a young girl, beautiful, gay, full of spirit
and vigor, who married and had four children.  Her husband died
penniless, and the mother made the most heroic efforts to educate the
children.  By dint of unremitting toil and unheard of sacrifices and
privations she succeeded in sending the boys to college and the girls
to a boarding-school.  When they came home, pretty, refined girls and
strong young men, abreast with all the new ideas and tastes of their
times, she was a worn-out, commonplace old woman.  They had their own
pursuits and companions.  She lingered unappreciated among them for two
or three years, and then died, of some sudden failure of the brain.
The shock of her fatal illness woke them to consciousness of the truth.
They hung over her, as she lay prostrate, in an agony of grief.  The
oldest son, as he held her in his arms, cried: "You have been a good
mother to us!"  Her face brightened, her eyes kindled into a smile, and
she whispered: "You never said so before, John."  Then the light died
out, and she was gone.

Many men spend more money on expensive caskets, flowers, and emblems of
mourning than they ever spent on their poor, loving, self-sacrificing
mothers for many years while alive.  Men who, perhaps, never thought of
carrying flowers to their mothers in life, pile them high on their
coffins.

Who can ever depict the tragedies that have been enacted in the hearts
of American mothers, who have suffered untold tortures from neglect,
indifference, and lack of appreciation?

What a pathetic story of neglect many a mother's letters from her
grown-up children could tell!  A few scraggy lines, a few sentences now
and then, hurriedly written and mailed--often to ease a troubled
conscience--mere apologies for letters, which chill the mother heart.

I know men who owe their success in life to their mother; who have
become prosperous and influential, because of the splendid training of
the self-sacrificing mother, and whose education was secured at an
inestimable cost to her, and yet they seldom think of carrying to her
flowers, confectionery, or little delicacies, or of taking her to a
place of amusement, or of giving her a vacation or bestowing upon her
any of the little attentions and favors so dear to a woman's heart.
They seem to think she is past the age for these things, that she no
longer cares for them, that about all she expects is enough to eat and
drink, and the simplest kind of raiment.

These men do not know the feminine heart which never changes in these
respects, except to grow more appreciative of the little attentions,
the little considerations, and thoughtful acts which meant so much to
them in their younger days.

Not long ago I heard a mother, whose sufferings and sacrifices for her
children during a long and trying struggle with poverty should have
given her a monument, say, that she guessed she'd better go to an old
ladies' home and end her days there.  What a picture that was!  An aged
woman with white hair and a sweet, beautiful face; with a wonderful
light in her eye; calm, serene, and patient, yet dignified, whose
children, all of whom are married and successful, made her feel as if
she were a burden!  They live in luxurious homes, but have never
offered to provide a home for the poor, old rheumatic mother, who for
so many years slaved for them.  They put their own homes, stocks, and
other property in their wives' names, and while they pay the rent of
their mother's meagerly furnished rooms and provide for her actual
needs, they apparently never think what joy it would give her to own
her own home, and to possess some pretty furnishings, and a few
pictures.

In many cases men through thoughtlessness do not provide generously for
their mothers even when well able to.  They seem to think that a mother
can live most anywhere, and most anyway; that if she has enough to
supply her necessities she is satisfied.  Just think, you prosperous
business men, how you would feel if the conditions were reversed, if
you were obliged to take the dependent, humiliating position of your
mother!

Whatever else you are obliged to neglect, take no chances of giving
your mother pain by neglecting her, and of thus making yourself
miserable in the future.

The time may come when you will stand by her bedside, in her last
sickness, or by her coffin, and wish that you had exchanged a little of
your money for more visits and more attentions and more little presents
to your mother; when you will wish that you had cultivated her more,
even at the cost of making a little less money.

There is no one else in this world who can take your mother's place in
your life.  And there is no remorse like that which comes from the
remembrance of ill-treating, abusing, or being unkind to one's mother.
These things stand out with awful vividness and terrible clearness when
the mother is gone forever from sight, and you have time to contrast
your treatment with her long suffering, tenderness, and love, and her
years of sacrifice for you.

One of the most painful things I have ever witnessed was the anguish of
a son who had become wealthy and in his prosperity neglected the
mother, whose sacrifices alone had made his success possible.  He did
not take the time to write to her more than twice a year, and then only
brief letters.  He was too busy to send a good long letter to the poor
old lonely mother back in the country, who had risked her life and
toiled and sacrificed for years for him!  Finally, when he was summoned
to her bedside in the country, in her last sickness, and realized that
his mother had been for years without the ordinary comforts of life,
while he had been living in luxury, he broke down completely.  And
while he did everything possible to alleviate her suffering, in the few
last days that remained to her on earth, and gave her an imposing
burial, what torture he must have suffered, at this pitiful picture of
his mother who had sacrificed everything for him!

"The regrets for thoughtless acts and indifference to admonitions now
felt and expressed by many living sons of dead mothers will, in time,
be felt and expressed by the living sons of living mothers," says
Richard L. Metcalfe, in the "Commoner."  "The boys of to-day who do not
understand the value of the mother's companionship will yet sing--with
those who already know--this song of tribute and regret:

  "'The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
      Are as a string of pearls to me;
  I count them over, every one apart,
      My rosary.

  "'Each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer,
      To still a heart in absence wrung;
  I tell each bead unto the end, and there
      A cross is hung.

  "'O memories that bless--and burn!
      Oh mighty gain and bitter loss!
  I kiss each bead and strive at last to learn
      To kiss the cross,
      Sweet heart,
      To kiss the cross.'"

No man worthy of the name ever neglects or forgets his mother.

I have an acquaintance, of very poor parentage, who had a hard struggle
to get a start in the world; but when he became prosperous and built
his beautiful home, he finished a suite of rooms in it especially for
his mother, furnished them with all conveniences and comforts possible,
and insisted upon keeping a maid specially for her.  Although she lives
with her son's family, she is made to feel that this part of the great
home is her own, and that she is as independent as though she lived in
her own house.  Every son should be ambitious to see his mother as well
provided for as his wife.

Really great men have always reverenced and cared tenderly for their
mothers.  President McKinley provided in his will that, first of all,
his mother should be made comfortable for life.

The first act of Garfield, after he was inaugurated President, was to
kiss his aged mother, who sat near him, and who said this was the
proudest and happiest moment of her life.

Ex-President Loubet of France, even after his elevation to the
presidency, took great pride in visiting his mother, who was a humble
market gardener in a little French village.  A writer on one occasion,
describing a meeting between this mother and her son, says: "Her noted
son awaited her in the market-place, as she drove up in her little cart
loaded with vegetables.  Assisting his mother to alight, the French
President gave her his arm and escorted her to her accustomed seat.
Then holding over her a large umbrella, to shield her from the
threatening weather, he seated himself at her side, and mother and son
enjoyed a long talk together."

I once saw a splendid young college graduate introduce his poor,
plainly dressed old mother to his classmates with as much pride and
dignity as though she was a queen.  Her form was bent, her hands were
calloused, she was prematurely old, and much of this deterioration was
caused by all sorts of drudgery to help her boy to pay his college
expenses.

I have seen other college men whose mothers had made similar
sacrifices, and who were ashamed to have them attend their graduating
exercises, ashamed to introduce them to their classmates.

Think of the humiliation and suffering of the slave mother, who has
given all the best of her life to a large family, battling with poverty
in her efforts to dignify her little home, and to give her children an
education, when she realizes that she is losing ground intellectually,
yet has no time or strength for reading, or self-culture, no
opportunity for broadening her mental outlook by traveling or mingling
with the world!  But this is nothing compared to the anguish she
endures, when, after the flower of her youth is gone and there is
nothing left of her but the ashes of a burned-out existence, the shreds
of a former superb womanhood, she awakes to the consciousness that her
children are ashamed of her ignorance and desire to keep her in the
background.

From babyhood children should be taught to look up to, not down on
their mother.  For that reason she should never appear before them in
slovenly raiment, nor conduct herself in any way that would lessen
their respect.  She should keep up her intellectual culture that they
may not advance beyond her understanding and sympathies.

No matter how callous or ungrateful a son may be, no matter how low he
may sink in vice or crime, he is always sure of his mother's love,
always sure of one who will follow him even to his grave, if she is
alive and can get there; of one who will cling to him when all others
have fled.

It is forever true, as Kipling poignantly expresses it in his beautiful
verses on "Mother Love":

  "'If I were hanged on highest hill,
    Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
  I know whose love would follow still,
    Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

  "'If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
    Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
  I know whose tears would come down to me,
    Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

  "'If I were cursed of body and soul,
    Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
  I know whose prayer's would make me whole!
    Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!'"

One of the saddest sights I have ever seen was that of a poor, old,
broken-down mother, whose life had been poured into her children,
making a long journey to the penitentiary to visit her boy, who had
been abandoned by everybody but herself.  Poor old mother!  It did not
matter that he was a criminal, that he had disgraced his family, that
everybody else had forsaken him, that he had been unkind to her--the
mother's heart went out to him just the same.  She did not see the
hideous human wreck that crime had made.  She saw only her darling boy,
the child that God had given her, pure and innocent as in his childhood.

Oh, there is no other human love like this, which follows the child
from the cradle to the grave, never once abandons, never once forsakes
him, no matter how unfortunate or degenerate he may become.

"So your best girl is dead," sneeringly said a New York magistrate to a
young man who was arrested for attempting suicide.  "Who was she?"
Without raising his eyes, the unfortunate victim burst into tears and
replied, "She was my mother!"  The smile vanished from the magistrate's
face and, with tears in his eyes, he said, "Young man, go and try to be
a good man, for your mother's sake."  How little we realize what
tragedy may be going on in the hearts of those whom we sneeringly
condemn!

What movement set on foot in recent years, deserves heartier support
than that for the establishment of a national Mothers' Day?

The day set apart as Mothers' Day by those who have inaugurated this
movement is _the second Sunday in May_.  Let us unite in doing all we
can to make it a real Mothers' Day, by especially honoring our mothers;
in the flesh, those of us who are so fortunate as to have our mothers
with us; in the spirit, those who are not so fortunate.

If away from her, write a good, loving letter, or telephone or
telegraph to the best mother who ever lived--your mother.  Send her
some flowers, an appropriate present; go and spend the day with her, or
in some other way make her heart glad.  Show her that you appreciate
her, and that you give her credit for a large part of your success.

Let us do all we can to make up for past neglect of the little-known,
half-appreciated, unheralded mothers who have had so little credit in
the past, and are so seldom mentioned among the world's achievers, by
openly, and especially in our hearts, paying our own mothers every
tribute of honor, respect, devotion, and gratitude that love and a
sense of duty can suggest.  Let us acknowledge to the world the great
debt we owe them by wearing, every one of us, boy and girl, man and
woman, on Mothers' Day, a white carnation--the flower chosen as the
symbol and emblem of motherhood.

Happily chosen emblem!  What could more fittingly represent motherhood
with its whiteness symbolizing purity; its lasting qualities,
faithfulness; its fragrance, love; its wide field of growth, charity;
its form, beauty!

What an impressive and beautiful tribute to motherhood it would be for
a whole nation to unite one day in wearing its chosen emblem, and in
song and speech, and other appropriate exercises, to honor its mothers!

CHAPTER LX

WHY SO MANY MARRIED WOMEN DETERIORATE

A woman writes me: "You would laugh if you knew the time I have had in
getting the dollar which I enclose for your inspiring magazine.  I would
get a pound less of butter, a bar less of soap.  I never have a cent of
my own.  Do you think it wrong of me to deceive my husband in this way?
I either have to do this or give up trying at all."

There are thousands of women who work harder than their husbands and
really have more right to the money, who are obliged to practise all
sorts of deceit in order to get enough to buy clothing and other things
essential to decent living.

The difficulty of extracting money from an unwilling husband has been the
beginning of thousands of tragedies.  The majority of husbands are
inclined to exert a censorship over their wives' expenditures.  I have
heard women say that they would go without necessary articles of clothing
and other requirements just as long as possible and worry for days and
weeks before they could summon courage to ask for money, because they
dreaded a scene and the consequent discord in the home.  Many women make
it a rule never to ask for money, except when the husband is leaving the
house and in a hurry to get away.  The disagreeable scene is thus cut as
short as possible, as he has not time then to go into all the details of
his wife's alleged extravagances and find out what has become of every
cent of the money given her on some similar previous occasion.

The average man does not begin to realize how it humiliates his wife to
feel that she must ask him for fifty cents, a dollar, or five dollars
every time she needs it, and to tell him just exactly what she is going
to do with it, and then perhaps be met with a sharp reproof for her
extravagance of foolish expenditures.

Men who are extremely kind and considerate with their wives in most
things are often contemptibly mean regarding money matters.  Many a man
who is generous with his tips and buys expensive cigars and orders costly
lunches for himself and friends at the club because he wants to be
considered a "good fellow," will go home at night and bicker with his
wife over the smallest expenditure, destroying the whole peace of the
household, when perhaps she does not spend as much upon herself as he
does for cigars and drink.

Why is it that men are so afraid to trust their wives with money when
they trust them implicitly with everything else, especially as women are
usually much more economical than men would be in managing the home and
providing for the children?  A large part of the friction in the average
home centers around money matters and could be avoided by a simple,
definite understanding between husband and wife, and a business
arrangement of household finances.  A regular advance to the wife for the
household and a certain sum for personal use which she need not account
for, would do more to bring about peace and harmony in the majority of
homes than almost anything else.

To be a slave to the home, as many women are, and then to be obliged to
assume the attitude of a beggar for every little bit of money she needs
for herself, or to have to give an accounting for every cent she spends
and tell her lord and master what she did with her last money before she
can get any more, is positively degrading.

When the husband gets ready to regard his wife as an equal partner in the
marriage firm instead of as an employee with one share in a
million-dollar company, or as merely a housekeeper; when he is willing to
regard his income as much his wife's as his own and not put her in the
position of a beggar for every penny she gets; when he will grant her the
same privileges he demands for himself; when he is willing to allow his
wife to live her own life in her own way without trying to "boss" her, we
shall have more true marriages, happier homes, a higher civilization.

Some one says that a man is never so happy as when he has a few dollars
his wife knows nothing about.  And there is a great deal of truth in it.
Men who are perfectly honest with their wives about most things are often
secretive about money matters.  They hoodwink them regarding their
incomes and especially about any ready cash they have on hand.

No matter how much the average man may think of his wife, or how
considerate he may be in other matters, he rarely considers that she has
the same right to his cash that he has, although he may be boasting to
outsiders of her superior management in matters of economy.  He feels
that he is the natural guardian of the money, as he makes it; that he has
a little more right to it than has his wife, and that he must protect it
and dole it out to her.

What disagreeable experiences, unfortunate bickerings, misunderstandings
and family prejudice could be avoided if newly-married women would insist
upon having a certain proportion of the income set aside for the
maintenance of the home and for their own personal needs, without the
censorship of their husbands and without being obliged to give an
itemized account of their expenditures!

It is a rare thing to find a man who does not waste ten times as much
money on foolish things as does his wife, and yet he would make ten times
the talk about his wife's one-tenth foolishness as his own ten-tenths.

On the other hand, thousands of women, starving for affection, protest
against their husband's efforts to substitute money for it--to satisfy
their cravings, their heart-hunger, with the things that money can buy.

It is an insult to womanhood to try to satisfy her nature with material
things, while the affections are famishing for genuine sympathy and love,
for social life, for contact with the great, throbbing world outside.
Women do admire beautiful things; but there is something they admire
infinitely more.  Luxuries do not come first in any real woman's desires.
She prefers poverty with love to luxury with an indifferent or loveless
husband.

How gladly would these women whose affections are blighted by cold
indifference or the unfaithfulness of their husbands, exchange their
liberal allowance, their luxuries, for genuine sympathy and affection!

One of the most pathetic spectacles in American life is that of the
faded, outgrown wife, standing helpless in the shadow of her husband's
prosperity and power, having sacrificed her youth, beauty, and
ambition--nearly everything that the feminine mind holds dear--to enable
an indifferent, selfish, brutish husband to get a start in the world.

It does not matter that in her unselfish effort to help him she burned up
much of her attractiveness over the cooking stove; that she lost more of
it at the washtub, in scrubbing and cleaning, and rearing and caring for
their children during the slavery of her early married life; it does not
matter how much she suffered during those terrible years of poverty and
privation.  Just as soon as the selfish husband begins to get prosperous,
finds that he is succeeding, feels his power, he often begins to be
ashamed of the woman who has given up everything to make his success
possible.

It is a sad thing to see any human being whose life is blighted by the
lack of love; but it is doubly pathetic to see a woman who has given
everything to the man she loved and who gets in return only her board and
clothes and an allowance, great or small.

Some men seem to think that the precept, "Man does not live by bread
alone," was not meant to include woman.  They can not understand why she
should not be happy and contented if she has a comfortable home and
plenty to eat and wear.  They would be surprised to learn that many a
wife would gladly give up luxuries and live on bread and water, if she
could only have her husband's sympathy in her aspirations, his help and
encouragement in the unfolding of her stifled talents.

I know a very able, promising young man who says that if he had had a
rich father he never would have developed his creative power; that his
ambition would have been strangled; that it was the desperate struggle to
make a place for himself in the world that developed the real man in him.

This young man married a poor girl who had managed by the hardest kind of
work and sacrifice to pay her way through college.  She had just begun to
develop her power, to feel her wings, when her husband caged her in his
home, took away her highest incentive for self-development.  He said that
a man who could not support a wife without her working had no business to
marry.  He dressed his wife like a queen; gave her horses and carriages
and servants.  But all the time he was discouraging her from developing
her self-reliance, taking away all motives for cultivating her
resourcefulness and originality.

At first the wife was very eager to work.  Her ambition rebelled against
the gilded chains by which she was bound.  She was restless, nervous, and
longed to use her powers to do something for herself and the world.

But her husband did not believe in a woman doing the things she wished to
do.  He wanted his wife to look pretty and fresh when he returned from
his business at night; to keep young and to shine in society.  He was
proud of her beauty and vivacity.  He thought he loved her, but it was a
selfish love, for real love has a tender regard for a person's highest
good, for that person's sake.

Gradually the glamour of society, the lethe of a luxurious life,
paralyzed her ambition, which clamored less and less peremptorily for
recognition, until at length she subsided into a life of almost total
inaction.

Multitudes of women in this country to-day are vegetating in luxurious
homes, listless, ambitionless, living narrow, superficial, rutty lives,
because the spur of necessity has been taken away from them; because
their husbands, who do not want them to work, have taken them out of an
ambition-arousing environment.

But a life of leisure is not the only way of paralyzing the development
of a wife's individuality.  It can be done just as effectively by her
becoming a slave of her family.  I believe that the average wife is
confined to her home a great deal too much.

Many women do not seem to have any existence outside of the little home
orbit; do not have any special interests or pleasures to speak of apart
from their husbands.  They have been brought up to think that wives have
very little purpose in life other than to be the slaves and playthings of
their lords and masters, to bear and bring up children, and to keep
meekly in the background.

The wife who wishes to hold her husband's affection, if he is ambitious,
must continue to grow, must keep pace with him mentally.  She must make a
continual investment in self-improvement and in intellectual charm so
that her mental growth will compensate for the gradual loss of physical
charm.  She must keep her husband's admiration, and if he is a
progressive man he is not likely to admire a wife who stands still
mentally.  Admiration is a very important part of love.

You may be very sure that if you have an ambitious husband you must do
something to keep up with him besides lounging, idling about the home,
reading silly novels, dressing stylishly and waiting for him to return at
night.  If he sees that your sun rises and sets in him, that you have
little interest outside, that you are not broadening and deepening your
life in other ways by extending your interests, reaching out for
self-enlargement, self-improvement, he will be disappointed in you, and
this will be a great strain upon his love.

It is impossible for a girl who has had only a little schooling to
appreciate the transforming power that comes from liberal education and
broad culture.  For the sake of her husband and children and her own
peace of mind and satisfaction, she should try to improve herself in
every possible way.  Think of what it means to be able to surround one's
home with an atmosphere of refinement, culture and superior intelligence!
The quality of one's own ideals has a great deal to do with the quality
of the ideals of one's family.

Even considered alone from the standpoint of self-protection, as a
safeguard, a woman ought to get a liberal education; a college education,
if possible.  The conditions of home life in this country are such that
it is very difficult for the wife to keep up with her husband's growth,
to keep pace with him, because he is constantly in an ambition-arousing,
stimulating environment.  Unless she is unusually ambitious and has great
power of application and concentration and plenty of leisure, she is
likely to drop behind her husband.

As a rule, the husband has infinitely more to encourage and stimulate him
than has the wife.  Success itself is a tremendous tonic.  The
consciousness of perpetual triumph, of conquering things, is a great
stimulus.

It is true that women have developed more admirable and loving qualities
in their home life than have men; but during all these centuries, while
women have been shut up in the home, men have been touching hands with
the great, busy world, absorbing knowledge of human nature and broadening
their minds by coming into contact with men and things.  They have
developed independence, stamina, strength, by being compelled to solve
the larger, more practical problems of life.

The business man and the professional man are really in a perpetual
school, a great practical university.  The strenuous life, however
dangerous, is essentially educative.  The man has the incalculable
advantage of a great variety of experiences and of freshness of view.  He
is continually coming in contact with new people, new things, being
molded by a vast number of forces in the busy world which never touch the
wife.

If women, equally with men, do not continue to grow and expand after
marriage, how can we expect race improvement?  Woman must ascend to
higher, wider planes, or both man and woman must descend.  "Male and
female created He them."  There is no separating them; they must rise or
fall together.

  "The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink
  Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free."

Many a man has tired of his wife because she has not kept pace with him;
because, instead of growing broader and keener as the years pass, she has
become narrow.  It never occurs to him that the fault may be wholly his
own.  In the early years of their married life he perhaps laughed at her
"dreams," as he called her longings for self-improvement.  He
discouraged, if he did not actually oppose, every effort she made to grow
to the full stature of her womanhood.  His indifference or hostility
quenched the hopes she had indulged before marriage.  The bitterness of
her disappointment crushed her spirit.  She lost her buoyancy and
enthusiasm and gradually sank to the level of a household drudge.  And
the husband wonders what has changed the joyous, high-spirited girl he
married into the dull, apathetic woman who now performs her duties like
an automaton.

There are to-day thousands of wives doing the work of ordinary
housemaids, who, putting it on a low standard, are smothering ability to
earn perhaps more money than the men who enslave them, if they only had
an opportunity to unfold the powers which God has given them; but they
have been brought up from infancy to believe that marriage is the only
real career for a woman, that these longings and hungerings for
self-expression are to be smothered, covered up by the larger duties of a
wife and mother.

If the husbands could change places with their wives for a year, they
would feel the contracting, narrowing influence in which the average wife
lives.  Their minds would soon cease to reach out, they would quickly
feel the pinching, paralyzing effect of the monotonous existence, of
doing the same things every day, year in and year out.  The wives, on the
other hand, would soon begin to broaden out.  Their lives would become
richer, fuller, more complete, from contact with the world, from the
constant stretching of their minds over large problems.

I have heard men say that remaining in the home on Sundays or holidays
just about uses them up; that it is infinitely harder and more trying
than the same time spent in their occupations, and that while they love
their children their incessant demands, the noise and confusion would
drive them to drink if they had to bear it all the time.  Strong men
admit that they can not stand these little nerve-racking vexations of the
home.  Yet they wonder why the wife and mother is nervous, and seem to
think that she can bear this sort of thing three hundred and sixty-five
days in the year without going away and getting relief for a half-dozen
days during the whole time.  Few men would exchange places with their
wives.  Their hours are shorter, and when their day's work is done, it is
done, while a wife and mother not only works all day, but is also likely
to be called during the night.  If any one is disturbed in the night by
the children, it is the mother; rarely the father.

How long would men continue to conduct their business offices or
factories with the primitive, senseless methods in vogue in the average
kitchen to-day?  Man puts all his inventiveness, his ingenuity, in
improving methods, in facilitating his business and getting the drudgery
out of his work in his office and factory, but the wife and mother still
plods along in an ill-fitted kitchen and laundry.  And yet our greatest
modern inventor has said that the cares of the home could be reduced to a
minimum and the servant problem solved if the perfectly practicable
devices, for lightening household labor were adopted in the home!

"But," many of our men readers will say, "is there any profession in the
world grander than that of home making?  Can anything be more
stimulating, more elevating, than home making and the rearing of
children?  How can such a vocation be narrowing or monotonous?"

Of course it is grand.  There is nothing grander in the universe than the
work of a true wife, a noble mother.  But it would require the
constitution of a Hercules, an infinitely greater patience than that of a
Job, to endure such work with almost no change or outside variety, year
in and year out, as many wives and mothers do, without breaking down.

The average man does not appreciate how almost devoid of incentives to
broadmindedness, to many-sidedness, to liberal growth, the home life of
many women is.

There is a disease called arrested development, in which the stature of
the adult remains that of a child, all physical growth and expansion
having stopped.

One of the most pitiable phases of American life and one of the most
discouraging elements in our civilization is the suppressed wife who is
struggling with arrested development after marriage.

I have known of beautiful young wives who went to their husbands with the
same assurance of confidence and trust as to their hopes and ambitions
with which a child would approach its mother, only to meet with a brutal
rebuff for even venturing to have an ambition which did not directly
enhance the husband's comfort or convenience in his home.

It is a strange fact that most men think that when a woman marries she
goes to her new home with as rigid vows as the monks take on entering the
monastery, or the nuns the convent, and they regard the suggestion of a
career for her, which does not directly bear upon the home, as domestic
treason.

There are some women, especially sensitive ones, who would never again
tell their husbands of their hopes and aspirations after they had been
laughed at and ridiculed a few times, but would be forever silent, even
when the canker of bitter disappointment was consuming them.

Suppose a girl has the brains and the ability of a George Eliot and she
marries a young business man who thinks that writing articles or books or
devoting a large part of her time to music is all nonsense; that her
place is at home, taking care of it and bringing up her children, and
denies her the right to exercise her talent.  How would he like to have
the conditions reversed?  It is true that woman is peculiarly fitted for
the home, and every normal woman should have a home of her own, but her
career should not be confined or limited to it any more than a man's.  I
do not see why she should not be allowed to live the life normal to her;
why she should be denied the right of self-expression, any more than the
man.  And I regard that man as a tyrant who tries to cramp her in the
natural expression of her ambition or sneers at, nags, and criticizes her
for seeking to bring out, to unfold, the sacred thing which the Creator
has given her.  This is one of her inalienable rights which no man should
dare interfere with.  If he does, he deserves the unhappiness which is
likely to come to his home.

A wife should neither be a drudge nor a dressed-up doll; she should
develop herself by self-effort, just as her husband develops himself.
She should not put herself in a position where her inventiveness,
resourcefulness, and individuality will be paralyzed by lack of motive.

We hear a great deal about the disinclination of college girls to marry.
If this is a fact, it is largely due to the unfairness of men.  The more
education girls get, the more they will hesitate to enter a condition of
slavery, even under the beautiful guise of home.

Is it any wonder that so many girls refuse to marry, refuse to take
chances of suppressing the best thing in them?  Is it any wonder that
they protest against putting themselves in a position where they will not
be able to deliver to the world the sacred message which the Creator has
given them?

I believe in marriage, but I do not believe in that marriage which
paralyzes self-development, strangles ambition, discourages evolution and
self-growth, and which takes away the life purpose.

To be continually haunted by the ghosts of strangled talents and
smothered faculties prevents real contentment and happiness.  Many a home
has been made miserable, not because the husband was not kind and
affectionate, not because there was not enough to eat and to wear, but
because the wife was haunted with unrealized hopes and disappointed
ambitions and expectations.

Is there anything more pitiful than such a stifled life with its crushed
hopes?  Is there anything sadder than to go through life conscious of
talents and powers which we can not possibly develop; to feel that the
best thing in us must be strangled for the want of opportunity, for the
lack of appreciation even by those who love us best; to know that we can
never by any possibility reach our highest expression, but must live a
sordid life when under different conditions a higher would be possible?

A large part of the marital infelicity about which we hear so much comes
from the husband's attempt to cramp his wife's ambition and to suppress
her normal expression.  A perversion of native instinct, a constant
stifling of ambition, and the longing to express oneself naturally,
gradually undermine the character and lead to discontentment and
unhappiness.  A mother who is cramped and repressed transmits the seeds
of discontent and one-sided tendencies to her children.

The happiest marriages are those in which the right of husband and wife
to develop broadly and naturally along individual lines has been
recognized by each.  The noblest and most helpful wives and mothers are
those who develop their powers to their fullest capacity.

Woman is made to admire power, and she likes to put herself under the
domination of a masterful man and rest in his protection.  But it must be
a _voluntary_ obedience which comes from admiration of original force, of
sturdy, rugged, masculine qualities.

The average man can not get away from the idea of his wife's service to
him personally; that she is a sort of running mate, not supposed to win
the race, but to help to pull him along so that _he_ will win it.  He can
not understand why she should have an ambition which bears no direct
relation to his comfort, his well-being, his getting on in the world.

The very suggestion of woman's inferiority, that she must stand in the
man's shadow and not get ahead of him, that she does not have quite the
same rights in anything that he has, the same property rights, the same
suffrage rights; in other words, the whole suggestion of woman's
inferiority, has been a criminal wrong to her.  Many women who are
advocating woman's suffrage perhaps would not use the ballot if they had
it.  Their fight is one for freedom to do as they please, to live their
own lives in their own way.  The greatest argument in the woman's
suffrage movement is woman's protest against unfair, unjust treatment by
men.  Man's opposition to woman suffrage is merely a relic of the
old-time domestic barbarism.  It is but another expression of his
determination to "boss" everybody and everything about him.

The time will come when men will be ashamed that they ever opposed
woman's suffrage.  Think of a man considering it right and just for his
most ignorant workman to have an equal vote with himself on public
matters and yet denying the right to his educated wife and daughters!

CHAPTER LXI

THRIFT

"Mony a mickle makes a muckle."--SCOTCH PROVERB.

"A penny saved is a penny earned."--ENGLISH SAYING.

"Beware of little extravagances; a small leak will sink a big
ship."--FRANKLIN.

"No gain is more certain than that which proceeds from the economical use
of what we have."--LATIN PROVERB.

"Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can."--JOHN WESLEY.

"All fortunes have their foundation laid in economy."--J. G. HOLLAND.

In the philosophy of thrift, the unit measure of prosperity is always the
smallest of coins current.  Thrift is measured not by the pound but by
the penny, not by the dollar but by the cent.  Thus any person in receipt
of an income or salary however small finds it in his power to practise
thrift and to lay the foundation of prosperity.

The word thrift in its origin means the grasping or holding fast the
things that we have.  It implies economy, carefulness, as opposed to
waste and extravagance.  It involves self-denial and frugal living for
the time being, until the prosperity which grows out of thrift permits
the more liberal indulgence of natural desires.

One of the primary elements of thrift is to spend less than you earn, to
save something however small from the salary received, to lay aside at
regular intervals when possible some part of the money earned or made, in
provision for the future.

"Every boy should realize, in starting out, that he can never accumulate
money unless he acquires the habit of saving," said Russell Sage.  "Even
if he can save only a few cents at the beginning, it is better than
saving nothing at all; and he will find, as the months go on, that it
becomes easier for him to lay by a part of his earnings.  It is
surprising how fast an account in a savings bank can be made to grow, and
the boy who starts one and keeps it up stands a good chance of enjoying a
prosperous old age.  Some people who spend every cent of their income on
their living expenses are always bewailing the fact that they have never
become rich.  They pick out some man who is known to have made a fortune
and speak of him as being 'lucky.'  There is practically no such thing as
luck in business, and the boy who depends upon it to carry him through is
very likely not to get through at all.  The men who have made a success
of their lives are men who started out right when they were boys.  They
studied while at school, and when they went to work, they didn't expect
to be paid wages for loafing half the time.  They weren't always on the
lookout for an 'easy snap' and they forged ahead, not waiting always for
the opportunities that never came, and bewailing the supposed fact that
times are no longer what they used to be."

"A young man may have many friends," says Sir Thomas Lipton, "but he will
find none so steadfast, so constant, so ready to respond to his wants, so
capable of pushing him ahead, as a little leather-covered book, with the
name of a bank on the cover.  Saving is the first great principle of
success.  It creates independence, it gives a young man standing, it
fills him with vigor, it stimulates him with proper energy; in fact, it
brings to him the best part of any success,--happiness and contentment."

It is estimated that if a man will begin at twenty years of age to lay by
twenty-six cents every working day, investing at seven per cent. compound
interest, he will at seventy years of age have amassed thirty-two
thousand dollars.

"Economy is wealth."  This proverb has been repeated to most of us until
we are either tired of it or careless of it, but it is well to remember
that a saying becomes a proverb because of its truth and significance.
Many a man has proved that if economy is not actual wealth, it is, in
many cases, potentially so.

Professor Marshall, the noted English economist, estimates that
$500,000,000 is spent annually by the British working classes for things
that do nothing to make their lives nobler or happier.  At a meeting of
the British Association, the president, in an address to the economic
section, expressed his belief that the simple item of food-waste alone
would justify the above-mentioned estimate.  One potent cause of waste
to-day is that very many of the women do not know how to buy
economically, and are neither passable cooks nor good housekeepers.
Edward Atkinson estimated that in the United States the waste from bad
cooking alone is over a hundred million dollars a year!

"Provided he has some ability and good sense to start with, is thrifty,
honest, and economical," said Philip D. Armour, "there is no reason why
any young man should not accumulate money and attain so-called success in
life."  When asked to what qualities he attributed his own success, Mr.
Armour said: "I think that thrift and economy had much to do with it.  I
owe much to my mother's training and to a good line of Scotch ancestors,
who have always been thrifty and economical."

"A young man should cultivate the habit of always saving something," said
the late Marshall Field, "however small his income."  It was by living up
to this principle that Mr. Field became the richest and most successful
merchant in the world.  When asked by an interviewer, whom I sent to him
on one occasion, what he considered the turning point in his career, he
answered, "Saving the first five thousand dollars I ever had, when I
might just as well have spent the modest salary I made.  Possession of
that sum, once I had it, gave me the ability to meet opportunities.  That
I consider the turning point."

The first savings prove the turning point in many a young man's career.
But it is true that the lack of thrift is one of the greatest curses of
modern civilization.  Extravagance, ostentatious display, a desire to
outshine others, is a vice of our age, and especially of our country.
Some one has said that "investigation would place at the head of the list
of the cause of poverty, wastefulness inherited from wasteful parents."

"If you know how to spend less than you get," said Franklin, "you have
the philosopher's stone."  The great trouble with many young people is
that they do not acquire the saving habit at the start, and never find
the "philosopher's stone."  They don't learn to spend less than they get.
If they learned that lesson in time, they would have little difficulty in
making themselves independent.  It is this first saving that counts.

John Jacob Astor said it cost him more to get the first thousand dollars
than it did afterwards to get a hundred thousand; but if he had not saved
the first thousand, he would have died poor.

"The first thing that a man should learn to do," says Andrew Carnegie,
"is to save his money.  By saving his money he promotes thrift,--the most
valued of all habits.  Thrift is the great fortune-maker.  It draws the
line between the savage and the civilized man.  Thrift not only develops
the fortune, but it develops, also, the man's character."

The savings bank is one of the greatest encouragements to thrift, because
it pays a premium on deposits in the form of interest on savings.  One of
the greatest benefits ever extended by this government to its citizens is
the opening of Postal Savings Banks where money can be deposited with
absolute security against loss, because the Federal Government would have
to fail before the bank could fail.  The economies which enable a man to
start a savings account are not usually pinching economies, not the
stinting of the necessaries of life, but merely the foregoing of selfish
pleasures and indulgences which not only drain the purse but sap the
physical strength and undermine the health of brain and body.

The majority of people do not even try to practise self-control; are not
willing to sacrifice present enjoyment, ease, for larger future good.
They spend their money at the time for transient gratification, for the
pleasure of the moment, with little thought for to-morrow, and then they
envy others who are more successful, and wonder why they do not get on
better themselves.  They store up neither money nor knowledge for the
future.  The squirrels know that it will not always be summer.  They
store food for the winter, which their instinct tells them is coming; but
multitudes of human beings store nothing, consume everything as they go
along, so that when sickness or old age come, there is no reserve,
nothing to fall back upon.  They have sacrificed their future for the
present.

The facility with which loose change slips away from these people is most
insidious and unaccountable.  I know young men who spend more for
unnecessary things, what they call "incidentals"--cigars, drinks, all
sorts of sweets, soda-water and nick-nacks of various kinds--than for
their essentials, board, clothes, rooms.  Then they wonder where all
their money goes to, as they never keep any account of it, and rarely
restrain a desire.  They do not realize it when they fling out a nickel
here and a dime there, pay a quarter for this and a quarter for that; but
in a week it counts up, and in a year it amounts to a large sum.

"He never lays up a cent" is an expression which we hear every day
regarding those who earn enough to enable them to save a competence.

A short time ago, a young man in New York complained to a friend of
poverty and his inability to save money.

"How much do you spend for luxuries?" asked the friend.

"Luxuries!" answered the young man, "if by luxuries you mean cigars and a
few drinks, I don't average,--including an occasional cigar or a glass of
light wine for a friend,--over six dollars a week.  Most of the boys
spend more, but I make it a rule to be moderate in my expenditures."

"Ten years ago," declared the friend, "I was spending about the same
every week for the same things, and paying thirty dollars a month for
five inconvenient rooms up four flights of stairs.  I had just married
then, and one day I told my wife that I longed to have her in a place
befitting her needs and refinement.  'John,' was her reply, 'If you love
me well enough to give up two things which are not only useless, but
extremely harmful to you, we can, for what those things alone cost, own a
pretty home in ten years.'

"She sat down by me with a pencil and paper, and in less than five
minutes had demonstrated that she was right.  You dined with me in the
suburbs the other day, and spoke of the beauty and convenience of our
cottage.  That cottage cost three thousand dollars, and every dollar of
it was my former cigar and drink money.  But I gained more than a happy
wife and pretty home by saving; I gained self-control, better health,
self-respect, a truer manhood, a more permanent happiness.  I desire
every young man who is trying to secure pleasure through smoking and
drinking, whether moderately or immoderately, to make use of his
judgment, and pencil and paper, and see if he is not forfeiting in a
number of directions far more than he is gaining."

There is an impressive fact in the Gospel story of the Prodigal Son.  The
statement "he wasted his substance in riotous living" means more than
that he wasted his funds.  It implies that he wasted _himself_.  And the
most serious phase of all waste is not the waste of substance but the
waste of self, of one's energy, capital, the lowering of morals, the
undermining of character, the loss of self-respect which thrift
encourages and promotes.

Thrift is not only one of the foundation-stones of a fortune, but also
one of character.  The habit of thrift improves the quality of the
character.

The saving of money usually means the saving of a man.  It means cutting
off indulgences or avoiding vicious habits which are ruinous.  It often
means health in the place of dissipation.  It often means a clear instead
of a cloudy and muddled brain.

Furthermore, the saving habit indicates an ambition to get on and up in
the world.  It develops a spirit of independence, of self-reliance.  A
little bank account or an insurance policy indicates a desire to improve
one's condition, to look up in life.  It means hope, it means ambition, a
determination to "make good."

People believe in the young man, who, without being mean or penurious,
saves a part of his income.  It is an indication of many sterling
qualities.  Business men naturally reason that if a young man is saving
his money, he is also saving his energy, his vitality, from being wasted,
that he is looking up in the world, and not down; that he is longheaded,
wise; that he is determined not to sacrifice the larger gain of the
future for the gratification of the hour.

A snug little bank account will add to your self-respect and
self-confidence, because it shows that you have practicability, a little
more independence.  You can look the world in the face with a little more
assurance, you can stand a little more erect and face the future with
more confidence, if you know that there stands between yourself and want
a little ready money or a safe investment of some kind.

The very consciousness that there is something back of you that will
prove a barrier to the wolf which haunts so many human beings, and which
is a terror and an efficiency destroyer to so many, will strengthen and
buttress you at every point.  It will relieve you from worry and anxiety
about the future; it will unlock your faculties, release them from the
restraint and suppression which uncertainty, fear, and doubt impose, and
leave you free to do your best work.

Another great aid and incentive to thrift is the life insurance policy.
"Primarily devised for the support of widows and orphans, life insurance
practise has been developed so as to include the secure investment of
surplus earnings in conjunction with the insurance of a sum payable at
death."

I am a great believer in the efficiency of savings-banks as character
builders; but life insurance has some greater advantages, especially in
furnishing that imperious "must," that spur of necessity so important as
a motive to most people.

People can put money into savings-banks when they get it, provided some
stronger desire does not overcome the inclination; but they feel that
they _must_ pay their insurance premium.

Then again, money obtainable just by signing the name is so easily
withdrawn for spending in all sorts of ways.  This is one reason why I
often recommend life insurance to young people as a means of saving.  It
has been of untold value as an object-lesson of the tremendous
possibilities in acquiring the saving habit.

I believe that life insurance is doing a great deal to induce the habit
of saving.  When a young man on a salary or a definite income takes out
an insurance policy he has a definite aim.  He has made up his mind
positively to save so much money every year from his income to pay his
premium.  Then it is easier for him to say "No," to the hundred-and-one
alluring temptations to spend his money for this and that.  He can say
"No," then with emphasis, because he knows he must keep up his insurance.

An insurance policy has often changed the habits of an entire family from
thriftlessness and spendthrift tendencies to thrift and order.  The very
fact that a certain amount must be saved from the income every week, or
every month, or every year, has often developed the faculty of prudence
and economy of the entire household.  Everybody is cautioned to be
careful because the premium must be paid.  And oftentimes it is the first
sign of a program or order,--system in the home.

The consciousness of a sacred obligation to make payments on that which
means protection for those dear to you often shuts out a great deal of
foolishness, and cuts out a lot of temptation to spend money for
self-gratification and to cater to one's weak tendencies.

The life insurance policy has thus proved to be a character insurance as
well, an insurance against silly expenditures, an insurance against one's
own weak will power, or vicious, weak tendencies; a real protection
against one's self, one's real enemy.

Among the sworn enemies of thrift may be named going into debt, borrowing
money, keeping no itemized account of daily expenditures, and buying on
the instalment plan.  That great English preacher Spurgeon said that
debt, dirt, and the devil made up the trinity of evil.  And debt can
discount the devil at any time for possibilities of present personal
torment.  The temptations to go into debt are increasing rapidly.  On
every hand in the cities one may read such advertisements as "We Trust
You," "Your Credit is Good With Us," and with these statements come
offers of clothing, furniture, and what not "on easy payments."  But as
the Irishman remarked after an experience with the instalment purchase of
furniture: "Onaisy payments they sure are."  As a matter of fact, the
easy payments take all the ease and comfort out of life--they are easy
only for the man who receives them.

Beware of the delusions of buying on the instalment plan.  There are
thousands of poor families in this country who buy organs and sets of
books and encyclopedias, lightning rods, farming implements, and all
sorts of things which they might get along without, because they can pay
for them a little at a time.  In this way, they keep themselves poor.
They are always pinching, sacrificing, to save up for the agent when he
comes around to collect.

All through the South there are poor homes of both colored and white
families, where there are not sufficient cooking utensils and knives,
forks, and spoons to enable the members to eat with comfort, and yet you
will find expensive things in their homes which they have bought on the
instalment plan, and which keep them poor for years trying to pay for
them.

As far as borrowing money is concerned the bitter experience of countless
men and women is crystallized in that old saying: "He that goes a
borrowing goes a sorrowing."  There is a world of safety for the man who
follows Shakespeare's advice: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

It is sometimes said flippantly that "poverty is no disgrace but it's
mighty uncomfortable."  And yet poverty is often a real disgrace.  People
born to poverty may rise above it.  People who have poverty thrust upon
them may overcome it.  In this great land of abundance and opportunity
poverty is in most cases a disgrace and a reproach.

Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, "I admonish you avoid poverty, the
temptation and worry it breeds."  There is something humiliating in being
poor.  The very consciousness that we have _nothing to show for our
endeavor_ besides a little character and the little we have done, is
anything but encouraging.  Somehow, we feel that we have not amounted to
much, and we know the world looks upon us in the same way if we have not
managed to accumulate something.  It is a reflection upon our business
ability, upon our judgment, upon our industry.  It is not so much for the
money, as for what it means to have earned and saved money; it is the
idea of thrift.  If we have not been thrifty, if we have not saved
anything, the world will look upon us as good for nothing, as partial
failures, as either lazy, slipshod, or extravagant.  They regard us as
either not having been able to make money, or if we have, not being able
to save it.

But let it be remembered that thrift is not parsimony not miserliness.
It often means very liberal spending.  It is a perpetual protest against
putting the emphasis on the wrong thing.

No one should make the mistake of economizing to the extent of planting
seeds, and then denying liberal nourishment to the plants that grow from
them; of conducting business without advertising; or of saving a little
extra expense by pinching on one's table or dress.  "A dollar saved is a
dollar earned," but a dollar spent well and liberally is often several
dollars earned.  A dollar saved is often very many dollars lost.  The
progressive, generous spirit, nowadays, will leave far behind the plodder
that devotes time to adding pennies that could be given to making dollars.

The only value a dollar has is its buying power.  "No matter how many
times it has been spent, it is still good."  Hoarded money is of no more
use than gold so inaccessible in old Mother Earth that it will never feel
the miner's pick.  There is plenty in this world, if we keep it moving
and keep moving after it.  Imagine everybody in the world stingy, living
on the principle of "We can do without that," or "Our grandfathers got
along without such things, and I guess I can."  What would become of our
parks, grand buildings, electrical improvements; of music and art?  What
would become of labor that nurses a tree from a forest to a piano or a
palace car?  What would become of those dependent upon the finished work?
What would happen, what panic would follow, if everybody turned stingy,
is indefinable.

"So apportion your wants that your means may exceed them," says Bulwer.
"With one hundred pounds a year I may need no man's help; I may at least
have 'my crust of bread and liberty.'  But with five thousand pounds a
year, I may dread a ring at my bell; I may have my tyrannical master in
servants whose wages I can not pay; my exile may be at the fiat of the
first long-suffering man who enters judgement against me; for the flesh
that lies nearest my heart, some Shylock may be dusting his scales and
whetting his knife.  Every man is needy who spends more than he has; no
man is needy who spends less.  I may so ill manage that, with five
thousand a year, I purchase the worst evils of poverty,--terror and
shame; I may so well manage my money that, with one hundred pounds a
year, I purchase the best blessings of wealth,--safety and respect."

CHAPTER LXII

A COLLEGE EDUCATION AT HOME

"Tumbling around in a library" was the phrase Oliver Wendell Holmes used
in describing in part his felicities in boyhood.  One of the most
important things that wise students get out of their schooldays is a
familiarity with books in various departments of learning.  The ability
to pick out from a library what is needed in life is of the greatest
practical value.  It is like a man selecting his tools for intellectual
expansion and social service.  "Men in every department of practical
life," says President Hadley of Yale, "men in commerce, in
transportation, or in manufactures--have told me that what they really
wanted from our colleges was men who have this selective power of using
books efficiently.  The beginnings of this kind of knowledge are best
learned in any home fairly well furnished with books."

Libraries are no longer a luxury, but a necessity.  A home without books
and periodicals and newspapers is like a house without windows.  Children
learn to read by being in the midst of books; they unconsciously absorb
knowledge by handling them.  No family can now afford to be without good
reading.

Children who are well supplied with dictionaries, encyclopedias,
histories, works of reference, and other useful books, will educate
themselves unconsciously, and almost without expense, and will learn many
things of their own accord in moments which would otherwise be wasted;
and which, if learned in schools, academies, or colleges, would cost ten
times as much as the expense of the books would be.  Besides, homes are
brightened and made attractive by good books, and children stay in such
pleasant homes; while those whose education has been neglected are
anxious to get away from home, and drift off and fall into all manner of
snares and dangers.

It is astonishing how much a bright child will absorb from being brought
up in the atmosphere of good books, being allowed to constantly use them,
to handle them, to be familiar with their bindings and titles.  It is a
great thing for children to be brought up in the atmosphere of books.

Many people never make a mark on a book, never bend down a leaf, or
underscore a choice passage.  Their libraries are just as clean as the
day they bought them, and, often, their minds are just about as clean of
information.  Don't be afraid to mark your books.  Make notes in them.
They will be all the more valuable.  One who learns to use his books in
early life, grows up with an increasing power for effective usefulness.

It is related that Henry Clay's mother furnished him with books by her
own earnings at the washtub.

Wear threadbare clothes and patched shoes if necessary, but do not pinch
or economize on books.  If you can not give your children an academic
education you can place within their reach a few good books which will
lift them above their surroundings, into respectability and honor.

Is not one's early home the place where he should get his principal
training for life?  It is here we form habits which shape our careers,
and which cling to us as long as we live.  It is here that regular,
persistent mental training should fix the life ever after.

I know of pitiable cases where ambitious boys and girls have longed to
improve themselves, and yet were prevented from doing so by the
pernicious habits prevailing in the home, where everybody else spent the
evenings talking and joking, with no effort at self-improvement, no
thought of higher ideals, no impulse to read anything better than a
cheap, exciting story.  The aspiring members of the family were teased
and laughed at until they got discouraged and gave up the struggle.

If the younger ones do not want to read or study themselves, they will
not let anybody else so inclined do so.  Children are naturally
mischievous, and like to tease.  They are selfish, too, and can not
understand why anyone else should want to go off by himself to read or
study when they want him to play.

Were the self-improvement habit once well established in a home, it would
become a delight.  The young people would look forward to the study hour
with as much anticipation as to playing.

Were it possible for every family that squanders precious time, to spend
an evening in such a home, it would be an inspiration.  A bright, alert,
intelligent, harmonious atmosphere so pervades a self-improving home that
one feels insensibly uplifted and stimulated to better things.

I know a New England family in which all the children and the father and
mother, by mutual consent, set aside a portion of each evening for study
or some form of self-culture.  After dinner, they give themselves
completely to recreation.  They have a regular romp and play, and all the
fun possible for an hour.  Then when the time comes for study, the entire
house becomes so still that you could hear a pin drop.  Everyone is in
his place reading, writing, studying, or engaged in some form of mental
work.  No one is allowed to speak or disturb anyone else.  If any member
of the family is indisposed, or for any reason does not feel like
working, he must at least keep quiet and not disturb the others.  There
is perfect harmony and unity of purpose, an ideal condition for study.
Everything that would scatter the efforts or cause the mind to wander,
all interruptions that would break the continuity of thought, is
carefully guarded against.  More is gained in one hour of close,
uninterrupted study, than in two or three broken by many interruptions,
or weakened by mind wandering.

Sometimes the habits of a home are revolutionized by the influence of one
resolute youth who declares himself, taking a stand and announcing that,
as for himself, he does not propose to be a failure, that he is going to
take no chances as to his future.  The moment he does this, he stands out
in strong contrast with the great mass of young people who are throwing
away their opportunities and have not grit and stamina enough to do
anything worth while.

The very reputation of always trying to improve yourself in every
possible way, of being dead in earnest, will attract the attention of
everybody who knows you, and you will get many a recommendation for
promotion which never comes to those who make no special effort to climb
upward.

There is a great deal of time wasted even in the busiest lives, which, if
properly organized, might be used to advantage.

Many housewives who are so busy from morning to night that they really
believe they have no time for reading books, magazines, or newspapers
would be amazed to find how much they would have if they would more
thoroughly systematize their work.  Order is a great time saver, and we
certainly ought to be able to so adjust our living plan that we can have
a fair amount of time for self-improvement, for enlarging life.  Yet many
people think that their only opportunity for self-improvement depends
upon the time left after everything else has been attended to.

What would a business man accomplish if he did not attend to important
matters until he had time that was not needed for anything else?  The
good business man goes to his office in the morning and plunges right
into the important work of the day.  He knows perfectly well that if he
attends to all the outside matters, all the details and little things
that come up, sees everybody that wants to see him, and answers all the
questions people want to ask, that it will be time to close his office
before he gets to his main business.

Most of us manage somehow to find time for the things we love.  If one is
hungry for knowledge, if one yearns for self-improvement, if one has a
taste for reading, he will make the opportunity.

Where the heart is, there is the treasure.  Where the ambition is, there
is time.

It takes not only resolution but also determination to set aside
unessentials for essentials, things pleasant and agreeable to-day for the
things that will prove best for us in the end.  There is always
temptation to sacrifice future good for present pleasure; to put off
reading to a more convenient season, while we enjoy idle amusements or
waste the time in gossip or frivolous conversation.

The greatest things of the world have been done by those who systematized
their work, organized their time.  Men who have left their mark on the
world have appreciated the preciousness of time, regarding it as the
great quarry.

If you want to develop a delightful form of enjoyment, to cultivate a new
pleasure, a new sensation which you have never before experienced, begin
to read good books, good periodicals, regularly every day.  Do not tire
yourself by trying to read a great deal at first.  Read a little at a
time, but read some every day, no matter how little.  If you are faithful
you will soon acquire a taste for reading--the reading habit; and it
will, in time, give you infinite satisfaction, unalloyed pleasure.

In a gymnasium, one often sees lax, listless people, who, instead of
pursuing a systematic course of training to develop all the muscles of
the body, flit aimlessly from one thing to another, exercising with
pulley-weights for a minute or two, taking up dumb-bells and throwing
them down, swinging once or twice on parallel bars, and so frittering
away time and strength.  Far better it would be for such people to stay
away from a gymnasium altogether, for their lack of purpose and
continuity makes them lose rather than gain muscular energy.  A man or
woman who would gather strength from gymnastic exercise must set about it
systematically and with a will.  He must put mind and energy into the
work, or else continue to have flabby muscles and an undeveloped body.

[Illustration: Julia Ward Howe]

The physical gymnasium differs only in kind from the mental one.
Thoroughness and system are as necessary in one as in the other.  It is
not the tasters of books--not those who sip here and there, who take up
one book after another, turn the leaves listlessly and hurry to the
end,--who strengthen and develop the mind by reading.

To get the most from your reading you must read with a purpose.  To sit
down and pick up a book listlessly, with no aim except to pass away time,
is demoralizing.  It is much as if an employer were to hire a boy, and
tell him he could start when he pleased in the morning, work when he felt
like it, rest when he wanted to, and quit when he got tired!

Never go to a book you wish to read for a purpose, if you can possibly
avoid it, with a tired, jaded mentality.  If you do, you will get the
same in kind from it.  Go to it fresh, vigorous, and with active, never
passive, faculties.  This practise is a splendid and effective cure for
mind-wandering, which afflicts so many people, and which is encouraged by
the multiplicity of and facility of obtaining reading matter at the
present day.

What can give greater satisfaction than reading with a purpose, and that
consciousness of a broadening mind that follows it, and growth, of
expansion, of enriching the life, the consciousness that we are pushing
ignorance, bigotry, and whatever clouds the mind and hampers progress a
little further away from us?

The kind of reading that counts, that makes mental fiber and stamina is
that upon which the mind is concentrated; approaching a book with all
one's soul intent upon its contents.

How few people ever learn to concentrate their attention.  Most of us
waste a vast amount of precious time dawdling and idling.  We sit or
stand over our work without thinking.  Our minds are blank much of the
time.

Passive reading is even more harmful in its effects than desultory
reading.  It no more strengthens the brain than sitting down in a
gymnasium develops the body.  The mind remains inactive, in a sort of
indolent revery, wandering here and there, without focusing anywhere.
Such reading takes the spring and snap out of the mental faculties,
weakens the intellect, and makes the brain torpid and incapable of
grappling with great principles and difficult problems.

What you get out of a book is not necessarily what the author puts into
it, but what you bring to it.  If the heart does not lead the head; if
the thirst for knowledge, the hunger for a broader and deeper culture,
are not the motives for reading, you will not get the most out of a book.
But, if your thirsty soul drinks in the writer's thought as the parched
soil absorbs rain, then your latent possibilities and the potency of your
being, like delayed germs and seeds in the soil, will spring forth into
new life.

When you read, read as Macaulay did, as Carlyle did, as Lincoln did--as
did every great man who has profited by his reading--with your whole soul
absorbed in what you read, with such intense concentration that you will
be oblivious of everything else outside of your book.

"Reading furnishes us only with the materials of knowledge," said John
Locke; "it is thinking that makes what we read ours."

In order to get the most out of books, the reader must be a thinker.  The
mere acquisition of facts is not the acquisition of power.  To fill the
mind with knowledge that can not be made available is like filling our
houses with furniture and bric-à-brac until we have no room to move about.

Food does not become physical force, brain, or muscle until it has been
thoroughly digested and assimilated, and has become an integral part of
the blood, brain, and other tissues.  Knowledge does not become power
until digested and assimilated by the brain, until it has become a part
of the mind itself.

If you wish to become intellectually strong, after reading with the
closest attention, form this habit: frequently close your book and sit
and think, or stand and walk and think--but think, contemplate, reflect.
Turn what you have read over and over in your mind.

It is not yours until you have assimilated it by your thought.  When you
first read it, it belongs to the author.  It is yours only when it
becomes an integral part of you.

Many people have an idea that if they keep reading everlastingly, if they
always have a book in their hands at every leisure moment, they will, of
necessity, become full-rounded and well-educated.

But they might just as well expect to become athletes by eating at every
opportunity.  It is even more necessary to think than to read.  Thinking,
contemplating what we have read, is what digestion and assimilation are
to the food.

Some of the biggest fools I know are always cramming themselves with
knowledge.  But they never think.  When they get a few minutes' leisure
they grab a book and go to reading.  In other words, they are always
eating intellectually, but never digesting their knowledge or
assimilating it.

I know a young man who has formed such a habit of reading that he is
almost never without a book, a magazine, or a paper.  He is always
reading at home, on the cars, at the railway stations, and he has
acquired a vast amount of knowledge.  He has a perfect passion for
knowledge, and yet his mind seems to have been weakened by this perpetual
brain stuffing.

By every reader let Milton's words be borne in mind:

          "Who reads
  Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
  A spirit and judgment equal or superior, . . .
  Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
  Deep versed in books and shallow in himself,
  Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
  And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
  As children gathering pebbles on the shore."

When Webster was a boy, books were scarce, and so precious that he never
dreamed that they were to be read only once, but thought they ought to be
committed to memory, or read and re-read until they became a part of his
very life.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning says, "We err by reading too much, and out of
proportion to what we think.  I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had
not read half as much; should have had stronger and better exercised
faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation."

Those who live more quietly do not have so many distracting influences,
and consequently think more deeply and reflect more than others.  They do
not read so much but they are better readers.

You should bring your mind to the reading of a book, or to the study of
any subject, as you take an ax to the grindstone; not for what you get
from the stone, but for the sharpening of the ax.

The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we
remember of them, but from their suggestiveness, their character-building
power.

"It is not in the library, but in yourself," says Fr. Gregory, "in your
self-respect and your consciousness of duty nobly done--that you are to
find the 'Fountain of Youth,' the 'Elixir of Life,' and all the other
things that tend to preserve life's freshness and bloom.

"It is a grand thing to read a good book--it is a grander thing to live a
good life--and in the living of such life is generated the power that
defies age and its decadence."

It is not the ability, the education, the knowledge that one has that
makes the difference between men.  The mere possession of knowledge is
not always the possession of power; knowledge which has not become a part
of yourself, knowledge which can not swing into line in an emergency is
of little use, and will not save you at the critical moment.

To be effective, a man's education must become a part of himself as he
goes along.  All of it must be worked up into power.  A little practical
education that has become a part of one's being and is always available,
will accomplish more in the world than knowledge far more extensive that
can not be utilized.

No one better illustrates what books will do for a man, and what a
thinker will do with his books, than Gladstone, who was always far
greater than his career.  He rose above Parliament, reached out beyond
politics, and was always growing.  He had a passion for intellectual
expansion.  His peculiar gifts undoubtedly fitted him for the church, or
he would have made a good professor at Oxford or Cambridge.  But,
circumstances led him into the political arena, and he adapted himself
readily to his environment.  He was an all round well read man, who
thought his way through libraries and through life.

One great benefit of a taste for reading, and access to the book world,
is the service it renders as a diversion and a solace.

What a great thing to be able to get away from ourselves, to fly away
from the harassing, humiliating, discouraging, depressing things about
us, to go at will to a world of beauty, joy, and gladness!

If a person is discouraged or depressed by any great bereavement or
suffering, the quickest and the most effective way of restoring the mind
to its perfect balance, to its normal condition, is to immerse it in a
sane atmosphere, an uplifting, encouraging, inspiring atmosphere, and the
most good in the world is found in the best books.  I have known people
who were suffering under the most painful mental anguish, from losses and
shocks which almost unbalanced their minds, to be completely
revolutionized in their mental state by the suggestive power which came
from becoming absorbed in a great book.

Everywhere we see rich old men sitting around the clubs, smoking, looking
out of the windows, lounging around hotels, traveling about, uneasy,
dissatisfied, not knowing what to do with themselves, because they had
never prepared for this part of their lives.  They put all their energy,
ambition, everything into their vocation.

I know an old gentleman who has been an exceedingly active business man.
He has kept his finger upon the pulse of events.  He has known what has
been going on in the world during his whole active career.  And he is now
as happy and as contented as a child in his retirement, because he has
always been a great reader, a great lover of his kind.

People who keep their minds bent in one direction too long at a time soon
lose their elasticity, their mental vigor, freshness, spontaneity.

If I were to quote Mr. Dooley, it would be:--"Reading is not thinking;
reading is the next thing this side of going to bed for resting the mind."

To my own mind, however, I would rather cite that versatile Englishman,
Lord Rosebery.  In a speech at the opening of a Carnegie library at West
Calder, Midlothian, he made a characteristic utterance upon the value of
books, saying in substance:

"There is, however, one case in which books are certainly an end in
themselves, and that is to refresh and to recruit after fatigue.  When
the object is to refresh and to exalt, to lose the cares of this world in
the world of imagination, then the book is more than a means.  It is an
end in itself.  It refreshes, exalts, and inspires the man.  From any
work, manual or intellectual, the man with a happy taste for books comes
in tired and soured and falls into the arms of some great author, who
raises him from the ground and takes him into a new heaven and a new
earth, where he forgets his bruises and rests his limbs, and he returns
to the world a fresh and happy man."

"Who," asks Professor Atkinson, "can overestimate the value of good
books, those strips of thought, as Bacon so finely calls them, voyaging
through seas of time, and carrying their precious freight so safely from
generation to generation?  Here are finest minds giving us the best
wisdom of present and past ages; here are the intellects gifted far
beyond ours, ready to give us the results of lifetimes of patient
thought, imaginations open to the beauty of the universe."

The lover of good books can never be very lonely; and, no matter where he
is, he can always find pleasant and profitable occupation and the best of
society when he quits work.

Who can ever be grateful enough for the art of printing; grateful enough
to the famous authors who have put their best thoughts where we can enjoy
them at will?  There are some advantages of intercourse with great minds
through their books over meeting them in person.  The best of them live
in their books, while their disagreeable peculiarities, their
idiosyncrasies, their objectionable traits are eliminated.  In their
books we find the authors at their best.  Their thoughts are selected,
winnowed in their books.  Book friends are always at our service, never
annoy us, rasp or nettle us.  No matter how nervous, tired, or
discouraged one may be, they are always soothing, stimulating, uplifting.

We may call up the greatest writer in the middle of the night when we can
not sleep, and he is just as glad to see us as at any other time.  We are
not excluded from any nook or corner in the great literary world; we can
visit the most celebrated people that ever lived without an appointment,
without influence, without the necessity of dressing or of observing any
rules of etiquette.  We can drop in upon a Milton, a Shakespeare, an
Emerson, a Longfellow, a Whittier without a moment's notice and receive
the warmest welcome.

"You get into society, in the widest sense," says Geikie, "in a great
library, with the huge advantage of needing no introductions, and not
dreading repulses.  From that great crowd you can choose what companions
you please, for in the silent levees of the immortals there is no pride,
but the highest is at the service of the lowest, with a grand humility.
You may speak freely with any, without a thought of your inferiority; for
books are perfectly well bred, and hurt no one's feelings by any
discriminations."

"It is not the number of books," says Professor William Mathews, "which a
young man reads that makes him intelligent and well informed, but the
number of well-chosen ones that he has mastered, so that every valuable
thought in them is a familiar friend."

It is only when books have been read and reread with ever deepening
delight, that they are clasped to the heart, and become what Macaulay
found them to be, the old friends who are never found with new faces, who
are the same to us in our wealth and in our poverty, in our glory and in
our obscurity.  No one gets into the inmost heart of a beautiful poem, a
great history, a book of delicate humor, or a volume of exquisite essays,
by reading it once or twice.  He must have its precious thoughts and
illustrations stored in the treasure-house of memory, and brood over them
in the hours of leisure.

"A book may be a perpetual companion.  Friends come and go, but the book
may beguile all experiences and enchant all hours."

"The first time," says Goldsmith, "that I read an excellent book, it is
to me just as if I had gained a new friend; when I read over a book I
have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one."

"No matter how poor I am," says William Ellery Channing, "no matter
though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling;
if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my
roof--if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise; and
Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of
the human heart,--I shall not pine for want of intellectual
companionship, though excluded from what is called the best society in
the place where I live."

"Books," says Milton, "do preserve as in a violl, the purest efficacie
and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.  A good Booke is
the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on
purpose to a Life beyond Life."

"A book is good company," said Henry Ward Beecher.  "It comes to your
longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.  It is not offended
at your absent-mindedness, nor jealous if you turn to other pleasures, of
leaf, or dress, or mineral, or even of books.  It silently serves the
soul without recompense, not even for the hire of love.  And yet more
noble, it seems to pass from itself, and to enter the memory, and to
hover in a silvery transformation there, until the outward book is but a
body and its soul and spirit are flown to you, and possess your memory
like a spirit."

CHAPTER LXIII

DISCRIMINATION IN READING

A few books well read, and an intelligent choice of those few,--these
are the fundamentals for self-education by reading.

If only a few well chosen, it is better to avail yourself of choices
others have already made--old books, the standard works tested by many
generations of readers.  If only a few, let them be books of highest
character and established fame.  Such books are easily found even in
small public libraries.

For the purpose of this chapter, which is to aid in forming a taste for
reading, there should be no confusion of choice by naming too many
books of one author.  If you read one and like it, you can easily find
another.

It is a cardinal rule that if you do not like a book, do not read it.
What another likes, you may not.  Any book list is suggestive; it can
be binding only on those who prize it.  Like attracts like.

Did you ever think that the thing you are looking for is looking for
you; that it is the very law of affinities to get together?

If you are coarse in your tastes, vicious in your tendencies, you do
not have to work very hard to find coarse vicious books; they are
seeking you by the very law of attraction.

One's taste for reading is much like his taste for food.  Dull books
are to be avoided, as one refuses food disagreeable to him; to someone
else the book may not be dull, nor the food disagreeable.  Whole
nations may eat cabbage, or stale fish, while I like neither.
Ultimately, therefore, every reader must make his own selection, and
find the book that finds him.  Any one not a random reader will soon
select a short shelf of books that he may like better than a longer
shelf that exactly suits some one else.  Either will be a shelf of good
books, neither a shelf of the best books, since if best for you or me,
they may not be best for everybody.

A most learned man in India, in turning the leaves of a book, as he
read, felt a little prick in his finger; a tiny snake dropped out and
wriggled out of sight.  The pundit's finger began to swell, then his
arm; and in an hour, he was dead.

Who has not noticed in the home a snake in a book that has changed the
character of a boy through its moral poison so that he was never quite
the same again?

How well did Carlyle divide books into sheep and goats.

It is probable that the careers of the majority of criminals in our
prisons to-day might have been vastly different if the character of
their reading when young had been different; had it been up-lifting,
wholesome, instead of degrading.

"Christian Endeavor" Clark read a notice conspicuously posted in a
large city:--"All boys should read the wonderful story of the desperado
brothers of the Western plains, whose strange and thrilling adventures
of successful robbery and murder have never before been equaled.  Price
five cents."  The next morning, Dr. Clark read in a newspaper of that
city that seven boys had been arrested for burglary, and four stores
broken into by the "gang."  One of the ringleaders was only ten years
old.  At their trial, it appeared that each had invested five cents in
the story of border crime.  "Red-eyed Dick, the Terror of the Rockies,"
or some such story has poisoned many a lad's life.  A seductive,
demoralizing book destroys the ambition unless for vicious living.  All
that was sweet, beautiful, and wholesome in the character before seems
to vanish, and everything changes after the reading of a single bad
book.  It has aroused the appetite for more forbidden pleasures, until
it crowds out the desire for everything better, purer, healthier.
Mental dissipation from this exciting literature, often dripping with
suggestiveness of impurity, giving a passport to the prohibited; this
is fatal to all soundness of mind.

A lad once showed to another a book full of words and pictures of
impurity.  He only had it in his hands a few moments.  Later in life he
held high office in the church, and years afterward told a friend that
he would have given half he possessed had he never seen it.

Light, flashy stories, with no intention in them, seriously injured the
mind of a brilliant young lady, I once knew.  Like the drug fiend whose
brain has been stupefied, her brain became completely demoralized by
constant mental dissipation.  Familiarity with the bad, ruins the taste
for the good.  Her ambition and ideas of life became completely
changed.  Her only enjoyment was the excitement of her imagination
through vicious books.

Nothing else will more quickly injure a good mind than familiarity with
the frivolous, the superficial.  Even though they may not be actually
vicious, the reading of books which are not true to life, which carry
home no great lesson, teach no sane or healthful philosophy, but are
merely written to excite the passions, to stimulate a morbid curiosity,
will ruin the best of minds in a very short time.  It tends to destroy
the ideals and to ruin the taste for all good reading.

Read, read, read all you can.  But never read a bad book or a poor
book.  Life is too short, time too precious, to spend it in reading
anything but the best.

Any book is bad for you, the reading of which takes away your desire
for a better one.

Many people still hold that it is a bad thing for the young to read
works of fiction.  They believe that young minds get a moral twist from
reading that which they know is not true, the descriptions of mere
imaginary heroes and heroines, and of things which never happened.
Now, this is a very narrow, limited view of a big question.  These
people do not understand the office of the imagination; they do not
realize that many of the fictitious heroes and heroines that live in
our minds, even from childhood's days, are much more real in their
influence on our lives than some of those that exist in flesh and blood.

Dickens' marvelous characters seem more real to us than any we have
ever met.  They have followed millions of people from childhood to old
age, and influenced their whole lives for good.  Many of us would look
upon it as a great calamity to have these characters of fiction blotted
out of our memory and their influence taken out of our lives.

Readers are sometimes so wrought up by a good work of fiction, their
minds are raised to such a pitch of courage and daring, all their
faculties so sharpened and braced, their whole nature so stimulated,
that they can for the time being attempt and accomplish things which
were impossible to them without the stimulus.

This, it seems to me, is one of the great values of fiction.  If it is
good and elevating, it is a splendid exercise of all the mental and
moral faculties; it increases courage; it rouses enthusiasm; it sweeps
the brain-ash off the mind, and actually strengthens its ability to
grasp new principles and to grapple with the difficulties of life.

Many a discouraged soul has been refreshened, re-invigorated, has taken
on new life by the reading of a good romance.  I recall a bit of
fiction, called "The Magic Story," which has helped thousands of
discouraged souls, given them new hope, new life, when they were ready
to give up the struggle.

The reading of good fiction is a splendid imagination exerciser and
builder.  It stimulates it by suggestions, powerfully increases its
picturing capacity, and keeps it fresh and vigorous and wholesome, and
a wholesome imagination plays a very great part in every sane and
worthy life.  It makes it possible for us to shut out the most
disagreeable past, to shut out at will all hideous memories of our
mistakes, failures, and misfortunes; it helps us to forget our trouble
and sorrows, and to slip at will into a new, fresh world of our own
making, a world which we can make as beautiful, as sublime, as we wish.
The imagination is a wonderful substitute for wealth, luxuries, and for
material things.  No matter how poor we may be, or how unfortunate, we
may be bedridden even, we can by its aid travel round the world, visit
its greatest cities, and create the most beautiful things for ourselves.

Sir John Herschel tells an amusing anecdote illustrating the pleasure
derived from a book, not assuredly of the first order.  In a certain
village the blacksmith had got hold of Richardson's novel "Pamela, or
Virtue Rewarded," and used to sit on his anvil in the long summer
evenings and read it aloud to a large and attentive audience.  It is by
no means a short book, but they fairly listened to it all.  "At length,
when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and
heroine together, and sets them living long and happily according to
the most approved rules, the congregation were so delighted as to raise
a great shout, and, procuring the church keys, actually set the parish
bells ringing."

"It all comes back to us now," said the brilliant editor of the
"Interior" not long ago, "that winter evening in the old home.  The
curtains are down, the fire is sending out a cheerful warmth and the
shaded lamps diffusing a well-tempered radiance.  The lad of fifteen is
bent over a borrowed volume of sea tales.  For hours he reads on,
oblivious of all surroundings, until parental attention is drawn toward
him by the unusual silence.  The boy is seen to be trembling from head
to foot with suppressed excitement.  A fatherly hand is laid upon the
volume, closing it firmly, and the edict is spoken, 'No more novels for
five years.'  And the lad goes off to bed, half glad, half grieved,
wondering whether he has found fetters or achieved freedom.

"In truth he had received both; for that indiscriminating command
forbade to him during a formative period of his life works which would
have kindled his imagination, enriched his fancy, and heightened his
power of expression; but if it closed to him the Garden of Hesperides,
it also saved him from a possible descent to the Inferno; it made
heroes of history, not demigods of mythology, his companions, and
reserved to maturer years those excursions in the literature of the
imagination which may lead a young man up to heaven or as easily drag
him down to hell.

"The boy who is permitted to saturate his mind with stories of 'battle,
murder, and sudden death,' is fitting himself, as the records of our
juvenile courts show, for the penitentiary or perhaps the gallows.  No
man can handle pitch without defilement.  We may choose our books, but
we can not choose their effects.  We may plant the vine or sow the
thistle, but we can not command what fruit each shall bear.  We may
loosely select our library, but by and by it will fit us close as a
glove.

"There was never such a demand for fiction as now, and never larger
opportunities for its usefulness.  Nothing has such an attraction for
life as life.  But what the heart craves is not 'life as it is.'  It is
life as it ought to be.  We want not the feeble but the forceful; not
the commonplace but the transcendent.  Nobody objects to the 'purpose
novel' except those who object to the purpose.  Dealing as it does in
the hands of a great master, with the grandest passions, the most
tender emotions, the divinest hopes, it can portray all these spiritual
forces in their majestic sweep and uplift.  And as a matter of history,
we have seen the novel achieve in a single generation the task at which
the homily had labored ineffectively for a hundred years.  Realizing
this, it is safe to say that there is not a theory of the philosopher,
a hope of the reformer, or a prayer of the saint which does not
eventually take form in a story.  The novel has wings, while logic
plods with a staff.  In the hour it takes the metaphysician to define
his premises, the story-teller has reached the goal--and after him
tumbles the crowd tumultuous."

With the assistance of Rev. Dr. E. P. Tenney, I venture upon the
following lists of books in various lines of reading:

_Fiction_

"The Arabian Nights Entertainment."

"Stories from the Arabian Nights" (Riverside School Library), contains
many of the more famous stories.  50 c.

Irving Bachelder's [Transcriber's note: "Bacheller"?] "Eben Holden," is
a good book.  400,000 copies were sold.

J. M. Barrie's "Little Minister," a story of Scottish life, is very
bright reading.

Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," is one of the most famous of allegories.

Cervantes' "Don Quixote" is so widely known that any well-read man
should know it.  Its humor never grows old.

Ralph Connor's three books,--"The Man from Glengarry," "Black Rock,"
and "The Sky Pilot,"--have sold 400,000 copies.

Of George W. Cable's books, "The Cavalier," and "Old Creole Days" are
among the best.

Dinah Mulock Craik's "John Halifax, Gentleman," is of rare merit.

C. E. Craddock's (pseudonym), "In the Tennessee Mountains" is
entertaining.  A powerful story of mountain-life.

Of F.  Marion Crawford's stories, among the best are "Mr. Isaacs" and
"A Roman Singer."

Alexander Dumas' "Count of Monte Christo" [Transcriber's note:
"Cristo"?] is a world-famous romance.

Of George Eliot, "Silas Marner" is the best of the short stories, and
"Romola" the best of the long.  "Adam Bede" ranks barely second to
"Silas Marner."

Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" remains a classic among earlier English
novels.

Edward Everett Hale's "Man without a Country" will be read as long as
the American flag flies.

Hawthorne's "Mosses from an Old Manse" are stories of unique interest,
and "The Scarlet Letter" is known to all well-read people.

Of Rudyard Kipling, read "Kim," and "The Man Who Would be King."

Pierre Loti's "Iceland Fisherman" is translated by A. F. de Koven.
McClurg, $1.00.

S. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" sold 125,000 copies.

Thomas Nelson Page's "Gordon Keith" sold 200,000 copies.

If you read only one of Walter Scott's novels, take "Ivanhoe," or "The
Talisman."  Five more of those most read are likely to follow.

Henryk Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis" is most notable.

Robert L. Stevenson's "Treasure Island," and "Doctor Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde," and "The Merry Men and Other Tales," are fair examples of the
charm and insight of this author.

He who reads Frank Stockton's "Rudder Grange" is likely to read more of
this author's books.

Mrs. H. B. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is still one of the great
stories of the world.

Of Mark Twain, "Huckleberry Finn," "The Innocents Abroad," and the
"Story of Joan of Arc" are representative volumes.

Miss Warner's "Wide, Wide World" is unique in American fiction.

John Watson's "Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush," sold 200,000 copies in
America.

Lew Wallace's "Ben Hur" is the greatest of scriptural romances.

Thirty-eight books by twenty-eight authors.  It would have been easier
to name a hundred authors and two hundred books.

I will add from "The Critic" a list whose sales have reached six
figures:--

_Books of Every-day Life_

  "David Harum," by Westcott . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  727,000
  "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch," by Alice Hegan Rice  345,000
  "The Virginian," by Owen Wister  . . . . . . . . . . .  250,000
  "Lovey Mary," by Alice Hegan Rice  . . . . . . . . . .  188,000
  "The Birds' Christmas Carol," by Mrs. Wiggin . . . . .  100,000
  "The Story of Patsy," by Mrs. Wiggin . . . . . . . . .  100,000
  "The Leopard's Spots," by Thomas G. Dixon, Jr.   . . .  125,000

_Romantic_

  "Richard Carvel," by Winston Churchill . . . . . . . .  400,000
  "The Crisis," by Winston Churchill . . . . . . . . . .  400,000
  "Graustark," by G. B. McCutcheon . . . . . . . . . . .  300,000
  "The Eternal City," by Hall Caine  . . . . . . . . . .  175,000
  "Dorothy Vernon," by Charles Major . . . . . . . . . .  150,000
  "The Manxman," by Hall Caine . . . . . . . . . . . . .  113,000
  "When Knighthood Was in Flower," by Charles Major  . .  400,000
  "To Have and to Hold," by Miss Johnston  . . . . . . .  300,000
  "Audrey," by Miss Johnston . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  165,000
  "The Helmet of Navarre," by Bertha Runkle  . . . . . .  100,000

CHAPTER LXIV

READING A SPUR TO AMBITION

The great use in reading is for self-discovery.  Inspirational,
character-making, life-shaping books are the main thing.

Cotton Mather's "Essay to Do Good" influenced the whole career of
Benjamin Franklin.

There are books that have raised the ideals and materially influenced
entire nations.

Who can estimate the value of books that spur ambition, that awaken
slumbering possibilities?

Are we ambitious to associate with people who inspire us to nobler
deeds?  Let us then read uplifting books, which stir us to make the
most of ourselves.

We all know how completely changed we sometimes are after reading a
book which has taken a strong, vigorous hold upon us.

Thousands of people have found themselves through the reading of some
book, which has opened the door within them and given them the first
glimpse of their possibilities.  I know men and women whose whole lives
have been molded, the entire trend of their careers completely changed,
uplifted beyond their dreams by the books they have read.

When Senator Petters of Alabama went to California on horseback in
1849, he took with him a Bible, Shakespeare, and Burns's poems.  He
said that those books read and thought about, on the great plains,
forever after spoiled him for reading poorer books.  "The silence, the
solitude," he said, "and the strange flickering light of the camp fire,
seemed to bring out the tremendous significance of those great books;
and I treasure them to-day as my choicest possessions."

Marshall Field and other proprietors of the great business houses of
Chicago petitioned the school authorities for improved instruction
along moral lines, affirming that the boys needed religious ideas to
make them more reliable in business affairs.

It has been said by President White of Cornell that,--"The great thing
needed to be taught in this country is _truth, simple ethics, the
distinction between right and wrong_.  Stress should be laid upon _what
is best in biography_, upon _noble deeds and sacrifices_, especially
those which show that the greatest man is not the greatest orator, or
the tricky politician.  They are a curse; what we need is _noble men_.
National loss comes as the penalty for frivolous boyhood and girlhood,
that gains no moral stamina from wholesome books."

If youths learn to feed on the thoughts of the great men and women of
all times, they will never again be satisfied with the common or low;
they will never again be satisfied with mediocrity; they will aspire to
something higher and nobler.

A day which is passed without treasuring up some good thought is not
well spent.  Every day is a leaf in the book of life.  Do not waste a
day any more than you would tear out leaves from the book of life.

The Bible, such manuals as "Daily Strength for Daily Needs," such books
as Professor C. C. Everett's "Ethics for Young People"; Lucy Elliott
Keeler's "If I Were a Girl Again"; "Beauty through Hygiene," by Dr.
Emma F. Walker, such essays as Robert L. Stevenson's "Gentlemen" (in
his "Familiar Studies of Men and Books") Munger's "On the Threshold";
John Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies"--these are the books that make young
men and maidens so trustworthy that the Marshall Fields and John
Wanamakers want their aid in the conduct of great business concerns.
Blessed are they who go much farther in later years, and who become
familiar with those

  "Olympian bards who sang
  Divine ideas below,
  Which always find us young
  And always keep us so."

The readers who do not know the Concord philosopher Emerson, and the
great names of antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Plato, have
yet great pleasures to come.

Aside from reading fiction, books of travel are of the best for mental
diversion; then there are Nature Studies, and Science and Poetry,--all
affording wholesome recreation, all of an uplifting character, and some
of them opening up study specialties of the highest order, as in the
great range of books classified as Natural Science.

The reading and study of poetry is much like the interest one takes in
the beauties of natural scenery.  Much of the best poetry is indeed a
poetic interpretation of nature.  Whittier and Longfellow and Bryant
lead their readers to look on nature with new eyes, as Ruskin opened
the eyes of Henry Ward Beecher.

A great deal of the best prose is in style and sentiment of a true
poetic character, lacking only the metrical form.  To become familiar
with Tennyson and Shakespeare, and the brilliant catalogue of British
poets is in itself a liberal education.  Rolfe's Shakespeare is in
handy volumes, and so edited as to be of most service.  Palgrave's
"Golden Treasury" of the best songs and lyrical poems in the English
language was edited with the advice and collaboration of Tennyson.  His
"Children's Treasury" of lyrical poetry is most attractive.  Emerson's
Parnassus, and Whittier's "Three Centuries of Song" are excellent
collections of the most famous poems of the ages.

Of Books of Travel, here are a dozen titles, where one might easily
name twelve hundred:--

Edmondo de Amicis,--"Holland and Its People," and his "Constantinople."

Frank T. Bullen's "Cruise of the Cachelot Round the World After Sperm
Wales."

J. M. Hoppin's "Old England."

Clifton Johnson, "Among English Hedgerows."

W. D. Howell's "Venetian Life"; "Italian Journeys."

Irving's "Sketch Book," and the "Alhambra."

Henry James, "Portraits of Places."

Arthur Smith's "Chinese Characteristics," and especially his "Village
Life in China."

It would be impossible to list books more interesting and more useful
than most fiction, which may be called Nature Studies.

I will name a few books that will certainly incite the reader to search
for more:--

Ernest Ingersoll's "Book of the Ocean."

Professor E. S. Holder's "The Sciences," a reading book for children.

Jean Mace's "History of a Mouthful of Bread."

E. A. Martin's "Story of a Piece of Coal."

Professor Charles A. Young's "The Sun," revised edition 1895.

Serviss' "Astronomy with an Opera-Glass," "Pleasures of the Telescope,"
"The Skies and the Earth."

Thoreau's "Walden; or Life in the Woods."

Mrs. F. T. Parsons' (Smith) Dana.  "According to Seasons"; talks about
the flowers in the order of their appearance in the woods and fields.
Describes wild flowers in order of blooming, with information about
their haunts and habits.  Also, by the same author, "How to Know the
Wild Flowers".  Describes briefly more than 400 varieties common east
of Chicago, grouping them by color.

Seton-Thompson's "Wild Animals I have Known"; of which 100,000 copies
have been sold.

F. A. Lucas' "Animals of the Past"

Bradford Towey's "Birds in the Bush," and "Everyday Birds."

President D. S. Jordan's "True Tales of Birds and Beasts."

D. L. Sharp's "A Watcher in the Woods."

W. H. Gibson's "Sharp Eyes."

M. W. Morley's "The Bee-people."

Never before was a practical substitute for a college education at home
made so cheap, so easy, and so attractive.  Knowledge of all kinds is
placed before us in a most attractive and interesting manner.  The best
of the literature of the world is found to-day in thousands of American
homes where fifty years ago it could only have been obtained by the
rich.

What a shame it is that under such conditions as these an American
should grow up ignorant, should be uneducated in the midst of such
marvelous opportunities for self-improvement!  Indeed, most of the best
literature in every line to-day appears in the current periodicals, in
the form of short articles.  Many of our greatest writers spend a vast
amount of time in the drudgery of travel and investigation in gathering
material for these articles, and the magazine publishers pay thousands
of dollars for what a reader can get for ten or fifteen cents.  Thus
the reader secures for a trifle in periodicals or books the results of
months and often years of hard work and investigation of our greatest
writers.

A New York millionaire,--a prince among merchants,--took me over his
palatial residence on Fifth Avenue, every room of which was a triumph
of the architect's, of the decorator's, and of the upholsterer's art.
I was told that the decorations of a single sleeping-room had cost ten
thousand dollars.  On the walls were paintings secured at fabulous
prices, and about the rooms were pieces of massive and costly
furniture, and draperies representing a small fortune, and carpets on
which it seemed almost sacrilege to tread covered the floors.  But
there was scarcely a book in the house.  He had expended a fortune for
physical pleasures, comforts, luxury, and display.  It was pitiful to
think of the physical surfeit and mental starvation of the children of
such a home as that.  When I went out, he told me that he came to the
city a poor boy, with all his worldly possessions done up in a little
red bandana.  "I am a millionaire," he said, "but I want to tell you
that I would give half I have to-day for a decent education."

Many a rich man has confessed to confidential friends and his own heart
that he would give much of his wealth,--all, if necessary,--to see his
son a manly man, free from the habits which abundance has formed and
fostered till they have culminated in sin and degradation and perhaps
crime; and has realized that, in all his ample provision, he has failed
to provide that which might have saved his son and himself from loss
and torture,--good books.

There is a wealth within the reach of the poorest mechanic and
day-laborer in this country that kings in olden times could not
possess, and that is the wealth of a well-read, cultured mind.  In this
newspaper age, this age of cheap books and periodicals, there is no
excuse for ignorance, for a coarse, untrained mind.  To-day no one is
so handicapped, if he have health and the use of his faculties, that he
can not possess himself of wealth that will enrich his whole life, and
enable him to converse and mingle with the most cultured people.  No
one is so poor but that it is possible for him to lay hold of that
which will broaden his mind, which will inform and improve him, and
lift him out of the brute stage of existence into their god-like realm
of knowledge.

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading," says Mary Wortley Montague;
"nor any pleasure so lasting."  Good books elevate the character,
purify the taste, _take the attractiveness out of low pleasures_, and
lift us upon a higher plane of thinking and living.

"A great part of what the British spend on books," says Sir John
Lubbock, "they save in prisons and police."

It seems like a miracle that the poorest boy can converse freely with
the greatest philosophers and scientists, statesmen, warriors, authors
of all time with little expense, that the inmates of the humblest cabin
may follow the stories of the nations, the epochs of history, the story
of liberty, the romance of the world, and the course of human progress.

Have you just been to a well educated sharp-sighted employer to find
work?  You did not need to be at any trouble to tell him the names of
the books you have read, because they have left their indelible mark
upon your face and your speech.  Your pinched, starved vocabulary, your
lack of polish, your slang expressions, tell him of the trash you have
given your precious time to.  He knows that you have not rightly
systemized your hours.  He knows that thousands of young men and women
whose lives are crowded to overflowing with routine work and duties,
manage to find time to keep posted on what is going on in the world,
and for systematic, useful reading.

Carlyle said that a collection of books is a university.  What a pity
that the thousands of ambitious, energetic men and women who missed
their opportunities for an education at the school age, and feel
crippled by their loss, fail to catch the significance of this, fail to
realize the tremendous cumulative possibilities of that great
life-improver that admirable substitute for a college or university
education--reading.

"Of the things which man can do or make here below," it was said by the
sage of Chelsea, "by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy, are
the things we call Books!  Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink
on them; from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew Book, what have
they not done, what are they not doing?"

President Schurmann of Cornell, points with pride to a few books in his
library which he says he bought when a poor boy by going many a day
without his dinner.

The great German Professor Oken was not ashamed to ask Professor
Agassiz to dine with him on potatoes and salt, that he might save money
for books.

King George III, used to say that lawyers do not know so much more law
than other people; but they know better where to find it.

A practical working knowledge of how to find what is in the book world,
relating to any given point, is worth a vast deal from a financial
point of view.  And by such knowledge, one forms first an acquaintance
with books, then friendship.

"When I consider," says James Freeman Clarke, "what some books have
done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope,
awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal of life to
those whose homes are hard and cold, bind together distant ages and
foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truths from
heaven,--I give eternal blessings for this gift."

For the benefit of the younger readers we give below a list of forty
juveniles.

Aesop's "Fables."

Louise M. Alcott's "Little Women," "Little Men," which stood at the top
of a list of books chosen in eleven thousand elementary class-rooms in
New York.

T. B. Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy."

Anderson's "Fairy Tales."

Amelia E. Barr's "The Bow of Orange Ribbon," a book for girls.

"Black Beauty."

E. S. Brooks, "True Story of General Grant."

Bulfinch's "Children's Lives of Great Men," "Age of Chivalry," and "Age
of Fable."

Bullen's "Log of a Sea Waif."

Burnett's "Little Lord Fauntleroy," and "Sara Crewe," the latter a book
for girls.

Butterworth's "Zig-Zag Journeys."

Carleton Coffin's, "Boys' of '76."

Eva Lovett Carson's "The Making of a Girl."

Ralph Connor's "Gwen," a book for girls.

Louis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," and "Through the Looking Glass."

Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast."

"De Amicin's Cuore," which has sold 200,000 in Italy.

DeFoe's "Robinson Crusoe."

Mary Mapes Dodge, "Hans Brinker," or "The Silver Skates," "Life in
Holland."

Eugene Field's "A Little Book of Profitable Tales."  It has sold
200,000 copies.

Grimm's "Fairy Tales."

Habberton's "Helen's Babies."

E. E. Hale's "Boy Heroes."

Chandler Harris' "Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country; What
the Children Saw and Heard There."  Fantastic tale interweaving negro
animal stories and other Georgia folklore with modern inventions.  "Mr.
Rabbit At Home"; sequel to "Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer
Country."  Animal stories told to children.

Charles Kingsley's "Water Babies."

Kipling's "Jungle Books," which have sold 175,000 copies.

Knox's "Boy Travelers."

Lanier's "Boy Froissart," and "Boy's King Arthur."

Edward Lear's "Nonsense Books."

Mabie's "Norse Stories."

Samuel's "From the Forecastle to the Cabin."  The experiences of the
author who ran away from home and shipped as cabin boy; points out
dangers that beset a seafaring life.

Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's "Faith Gartney's Girlhood."

Kate Douglas Wiggin's "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."

Not long ago President Eliot of Harvard College aroused widespread
controversy over his selection of a library of books, which might be
contained on a five-foot shelf.  We append his selections as indicative
of the choice of a great scholar and educator.

The following sixteen titles may be had in Everyman's Library, cloth
350. net per volume; leather 70 c. net per volume:

_President Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf_

Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.

Sir Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici."

"Confessions of St. Augustine."

Shelley's "The Cenci" (contained in volume two of the complete works).

Emerson's "English Traits," and "Representative Men."

Emerson's Essays.

Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

Bacon's Essays.

Walton's "Complete Angler."

Milton's Poems.

Goethe's "Faust."

Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus."

Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations."

Browning's "Blot on the Scutcheon" (contained in volume one of the
poems).

Dante's "Divine Comedy."

Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."

Thomas Á. Kempis' "Imitation of Christ."

Burns's "Tam O'Shanter."

Dryden's "Translation of the Aeneid."

Walton's Lives of Donne, and Herbert.

Ben Johnson's "Volpone."

Smith's "Wealth of Nations."

Plutarch's "Lives."

Letters of Pliny.

Cicero's Select Letters.

Plato's "Phaedrus."

Epictetus' Discourses.

Socrates' "Apology and Crito."

Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy."

Milton's Tractate on Education.

Bacon's "New Atlantis."

Darwin's "Origin of Species."

Webster's "Duchess of Malfi."

Dryden's "All for Love."

Thomas Middleton's "The Changeling."

John Woolman's Journal.

"Arabian Nights."

Tennyson's "Becket."

Penn's "Fruits of Solitude."

Milton's "Areopagitica."

The following list of books is offered as suggestive of profitable
lines of reading for all classes and tastes:

_Books on Nature_

Thoreau's, "Cape Cod," "Maine Woods," "Excursions."

Burroughs' "Ways of Nature," "Wake Robin," "Signs and Seasons,"
"Pepacton."

Jefferies' "Life of the Fields," "Wild Life in a Southern Country," and
"Idylls of Field and Hedgerow."

Lubbock's "Beauties of Nature."

Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee."

Thompson's "My Winter Garden."

Warner's "My Summer in a Garden."

Van Dyke's "Little Rivers," "Fisherman's Luck."

White's "The Forest."

Mrs. Wright's "Garden of a Commuter's Wife."

Wordsworth's and Bryant's Poems.

_Novels Descriptive of American Life_

Simms' "The Partisan."

Cooper's "The Spy."

Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables."

Cable's "Old Creole Days," "The Grandissimes."

Howells' "The Rise of Silas Lapham."

Howells' "A Hazard of New Fortunes."

Eggleston's "A Hoosier Schoolmaster."

Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories."

Mary Hallock Foote's "The Led-Horse Claim."

Octave Thanet's "Heart of Toil," "Stories of a Western Town."

Wister's "The Virginian," "Lady Baltimore."

E. Hopkinson Smith's "The Fortune of Oliver Horn."

Thomas Nelson Page's "Short Stories," and "Red Rock."

Mrs. Delands' "Old Chester Tales."

J. L. Allen's "Flute and Violin," "The Choir Invisible."

Frank Norris' "The Octopus," "The Pit"

Garland's "Main Traveled Roads."

Miss Jewett's "Country of the Pointed Firs," "The Tory Lover."

Miss Wilkins' "New England Nun," "Pembroke."

Churchill's "The Crisis," "Coniston," "Mr. Crewe's Career."

Brander Matthews' "His Father's Son."

S. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne."

Fox's "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come."

Mrs. Wharton's "The House of Mirth."

Robert Grant's "Unleavened Bread."

Robert Herrick's "The Common Lot," "The Memoirs of an American Citizen."

Grace E. King's "Balcony Stories."

_Books Which Interpret American Ideals_

Emerson's Addresses and Essays.

Lowell's Essay on Democracy.

Lincoln's Inaugural Addresses.

Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery."

Jacob Riis' "The Making of An American."

Higginson's "The New World and the New Book."

Brander Matthews' "Introduction to American Literature."

Whittier's "Snow-Bound."

Louise Manley's "Southern Literature."

Thomas Nelson Page's "The Old South."

E. J. Turner's "The Rise of the New West"

Churchill's "The Crossing."

James Bryce's "American Commonwealth."

_Some of the Best Biographies_

"Life of Sir Walter Scott," Lockhart.

"Life of Frederick the Great," Carlyle.

"Alfred Lord Tennyson," by his son.

"Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley," by his son.

Plutarch's "Lives."

"Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and
Architects," Vasari.

"Cicero and His Friends," Boissier.

"Life of Samuel Johnson," Boswell.

Autobiography of Leigh Hunt.

"Memoirs of My Life and Writings," Gibbon.

Autobiography of Martineau.

"Life of John Sterling," Carlyle.

"Life and Times of Goethe," Grimm.

"Life and Letters of Macaulay," Trevelyan.

"Life of Charles James Fox," Trevelyan.

"Life of Carlyle," Froude.

Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography.

Boswell's "Johnson."

Trevelyan's "Life of Macaulay."

Carlyle's, "Frederick the Great."

Stanley's, "Thomas Arnold."

Hughes', "Alfred the Great."

Mrs. Kingsley's, "Charles Kingsley."

Lounsbury's, "Cooper."

Greenslet's, "Lowell," and "Aldrich."