has done and
understands. Some phase of school work may need to be carried on by the
older ones in the family, but the younger boys are free to work with the
father in anything that will stimulate and inspire. What shall the work
be? To every one who has had to do with a large number of children the
answer comes quickly enough. _In reading and conversation will the boy
and his father come most closely together_, in a field that is
attractive to both and where it is as easy to find entertainment and
pleasure as it is to gain information and culture.

Two quotations from men of good judgment come into mind at this point.
Arthur T. Hadley, recently President of Yale University, has said, "Men
in every department of practical life, men in commerce, in
transportation or in manufactures, have told me that what they really
wanted from our college was men who have this selective power of using
books efficiently. The beginnings of knowledge are best learned in any
home fairly well furnished with books." Professor William Mathews has
added, "It is not the number of books 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."

In those two quotations the ideas of prime importance to every father
are, first, that the beginnings of knowledge are best learned in the
home; and, second, that it is the mastery of what is read that really
counts. In school a child learns to read; at his home he reads to learn.
At school he learns how he ought to read; but it is at his home that he
learns to read in that manner. What a boy does in school is a small part
of the total amount of his reading, and its influence is small indeed.
In home reading, then, reading of the right material in the right way,
is to be found the great influence in education and the great factor in
the building of character.

If such is the case, what more important work can there be for the
father than to read with his son, to watch these beginnings of education
which mean so much more than the mere instruction in school, and to be a
power in developing that right method of reading which means not only
the acquisition of knowledge but also the acquirement of power and the
making of character. The busy man is tired at night and inclined to
think that he has no time to give to reading with his boys. He may
think, too, that reading childish