ep people as much as possible away from the books, and to hand these
over to his successor as little worn by use as he could. Librarians now,
it is pleasant to see, have a different notion of their trust, and are
in the habit of preparing for the direction of the inexperienced lists
of such books as they think best worth reading. Cataloging has also,
thanks in great measure to American librarians, become a science, and
catalogs, ceasing to be labyrinths without a clew, are furnished with
finger-posts at every turn. Subject catalogs again save the beginner a
vast deal of time and trouble, by supplying him for nothing with one at
least of the results of thorough scholarship, the knowing where to look
for what he wants. I do not mean by this that there is or can be any
short-cut to learning, but that there may be, and is, such a short-cut
to information that will make learning more easily accessible.

But have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read
means? That it is the key that admits us to the whole world of thought
and fancy and imagination; to the company of saint and sage, of the
wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it
enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and
listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it
annihilates time and space for us; it revives for us without a miracle
the Age of Wonder, endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap
of darkness, so that we walk invisible like fern seed and witness
unharmed the plague at Athens or Florence or London, accompanying Caesar
on his marches, or look in on Catiline in council with his
fellow-conspirators, or Guy Fawkes in the cellar of St. Stephen's. We
often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any
insult, for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what
is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that
there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs
can be admitted for the asking--a society, too, which will not involve
them in ruinous expense and still more ruinous waste of time and health
and faculties?

Southey tells us that, in his walk, one stormy day, he met an old
woman, to whom, by way of greeting, he made the rather obvious remark
that it was dreadful weather. She answered, philosophically, that, in
her opinion, '_any_ weather was better than none!' I should be half
inclined to sa