deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend--for even
the memories of him are embittered; but no great author can ever have
done anything that will make the book you love less precious to you.

The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves, I know, of
miscellaneous reading, and no modern moralist will agree with Madame de
S['e]vign['e] that "bad books are better than no books at all"; but
Madame de S['e]vign['e] may have meant books written in a bad style, or
feeble books, and not books bad in the moral sense. However, I must
confess that when I was young, I read several books which I was told
afterward were very bad indeed. But I did not find this out until
somebody told me! The youthful mind must possess something of the
quality attributed to a duck's back! I recall that once "The Confessions
of Rousseau" was snatched suddenly away from me by a careful mother just
as I had begun to think that Jean Jacques was a very interesting man and
almost as queer as some of the people I knew. I believe that if I had
been allowed to finish the book, it would have become by some mental
chemical process a very edifying criticism of life.

"Tom Jones" I found in an attic and I was allowed to read it by a pious
aunt, whom I was visiting, because she mixed it up with "Tom Brown of
Rugby"; but I found it even more tiresome than "Eric, or Little by
Little," for which I dropped it. I remember, too, that I was rather
shocked by some things written in the Old Testament; and I retorted to
my aunt's pronouncement that she considered "the 'Arabian Nights' a
dangerous book," by saying that the Old Testament was the worst book I
had ever read; but I supposed "people had put something into it when God
wasn't looking." She sent me home.

At home, I was permitted to read only the New Testament. On winter
Sunday afternoons, when there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely
attached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to the conclusion that
nobody could tell a short story as well as Our Lord Himself. The
Centurion was one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be such a
good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not worthy," flashes across my
mental vision every day of my life.

In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel is read every Sunday, and
carefully interpreted. This always interested me because I knew in
advance what the priest was going to read. Most of the children of my
acquaintance were taught their Scriptures through the In