e craze for visible and audible entertainment, we have
lost the habit of reading. Why trouble to plough for ten or twelve
hours through a volume when one may look upon its contents picturized
within the duration of an evening's performance at the theatre and in
addition the "evil of solitariness" be avoided?

There is a real advantage in the old-time habit of reading aloud in
the home. It is one conducive to community of interest and a
heightened tone of home-contacts. It is far better to make dinner or
library conversation revolve around worth-while books than worthless
persons. It may not be easy for some parents to acquire or achieve
this home habit of reading aloud but it is of the highest importance
that children be enabled to respect their parents as thinking and
cultivated persons if these they can become. One cannot help
regretting that reading aloud is becoming a lost art. One hardly knows
how badly reading aloud can be done and how wretchedly it is for the
most part taught until one asks one's children to read aloud.

The choice and the art of reading can best be stimulated and guided
within the intimacy of the home. It may, as I have said, be difficult
for parents, especially fathers, to accustom themselves to the
practice of reading aloud. It may seem sternly and cruelly taskful to
read to and with one's children when it is so much pleasanter to
exercise one's mind at bridge whist with contemporaries or to yield to
the pleasurable anodyne of the "movies." And yet I do not know of a
truer service that parents can render children than to foster a taste
for worth-while books, for the best that has been said and sung, if
one may so paraphrase, so that these may know and love the great
things in prose and poetry alike. It is never too late to begin the
habit of reading any more than adults ever find it too late to learn
to dance or to play bridge.

Alice Freeman Palmer has put it[C]: "You will want your daughter to feel
that you were a student, too, when she becomes one, and that the
learning is never done as long as we are in God's wonderful world." What
a difference it will make when all mothers have such relations with
their children beside the life of love. When I say that it is for you to
live with your children, I do not mean that you are to go to the theatre
with them daily or thrice weekly, for that is merely sharing pastimes
with them. I say live with them, not merely join them in their
amusements. No