esence, but let us not go to extremes! And so,
after I have read a few books of marital complication, I yearn for the
old-fashioned couple in the older books who went hand in hand to old age.
At this minute there is a black book that looks down upon me like a crow.
It is "Crime and Punishment." I read it once when I was ill, and I nearly
died of it. I confess that after a very little acquaintance with such
books I am tempted to sequester them on a top shelf somewhere, beyond
reach of tiptoe, where they may brood upon their banishment and rail
against the world.

Encyclopedias and the tonnage of learning properly take their places on
the lowest shelves, for their lump and mass make a fitting foundation. I
must say, however, that the habit of the dictionary of secreting itself in
the darkest corner of the lowest shelf contributes to general illiteracy.
I have known families wrangle for ten minutes on the meaning of a word
rather than lift this laggard from its depths. Be that as it may, the
novels and poetry should be on the fifth shelf from the bottom, just off
the end of the nose, so to speak.

Now, the vinegar cruet is never the largest vessel in the house. So by
strict analogy, sour books--the kind that bite the temper and snarl upon
your better moods--should be in a small minority. Do not mistake me! I
shall find a place, maybe, for a volume or two of Nietzsche, and all of
Ibsen surely. I would admit _uplift_ too, for my taste is catholic. And
there will be other books of a kind that never rouse a chuckle in you. For
these are necessary if for no more than as alarm clocks to awake us from
our dreaming self-content. But in the main I would not have books too
insistent upon the wrongs of the world and the impossibility of remedy.

I confess to a liking for tales of adventure, for wrecks in the South
Seas, for treasure islands, for pirates with red shirts. Mark you, how a
red shirt lights up a dull page! It is like a scarlet leaf on a gray
November day. Also I have a weakness for the bang of pistols, round oaths
and other desperate rascality. In such stories there is no small mincing.
A villain proclaims himself on his first appearance--unless John Silver be
an exception--and retains his villainy until the rope tightens about his
neck in the last chapter but one; the very last being set aside for the
softer commerce of the hero and heroine.

You will remember that about twenty years ago a fine crop of such stories
ca