earns to love hunting, and before
working up many topics, he forms an investigating habit which will
perpetuate itself. Thus while seeking an oyster, he finds a pearl, like
SAUL who sought asses and found a kingdom. Henceforth he reads more by
subjects, each a cord to string pearls on, than by volumes, for he feels
that,

"Unless to some particular end designed,
Reading is but a specious trifling of the mind,
And then, like ill-digested food,
To humors turns and not to blood."

But less and less of that sort is his reading, though it range through
all time, and tax all the world. Such an inquirer will live longer than
METHUSELAH, for he will have more thoughts, yet he will wish each of his
minutes was a millenary. He will read with an appetite growing as long
as he lives; indeed reading will help him to live longer. A thousand
such readers feel what one has spoken out, saying:

"In a library I was thrown, instead of worse society, into the company
of poets, philosophers and sages--to me good angels and ministers of
grace. From these silent instructors who often do more than fathers for
our interests, from these delightful associates I learned something of
the divine and more of the human religion. They were my interpreters in
the House Beautiful of God, and my guides among the Delectable Mountains
of Nature,

Blessing be with them and eternal praise,
Who gave me nobler loves and nobler cares."

Pre-eminently to the _young_ will the myriad-minded library be an oracle
in perplexities. They have been better trained in public schools than we
of the last generation were. They have broken ground in more various
studies, and their curiosity has been stimulated concerning more
questions. Each question, each study puts in their hand a new _key_ to
the locks which shut up libraries. Singers love to sing, and it is joy
for the just to do justice, so will our youth rejoice to use in the
library the skill they have acquired in school as naturally as when they
get jack knives they take to whittling. The public schools then find in
free libraries their fitting supplement, and complement. Schools without
libraries feed a prisoner with salted viands and then tantalize his
thirst with pitchers and bottles, all empty. The free school and the
free library will join hands like husband and wife in a well-matched
marriage.

"He is the half-part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such as she;