e people. Give us all a chance to help, and
then the library will belong to all of us.

WISCONSIN FREE LIBRARY COMMISSION.

LIBRARIES AND HAPPINESS

The great purpose of a public library is to promote and unite
intelligence. It brings together the products of the wise minds of the
world. It holds within its walls a collection of all the wise and witty
things ever said: these it marks and indexes and offers to its friends.

It is in its community a sort of intellectual minuteman, always ready to
supply to every comer something of interest and pleasure. It puts good
books, and no others, into the hands of children. It tells about
Cinderella and informs you on riots in Moscow. It offers you a novel of
modern Japan and a history of Venice of the past. It knows about the
milk in the cocoanut, the floods of the river Nile, the advantages of
education, the evils of legislation, how to plan a home, why bread won't
rise, and can tell more about the mental failings that give Jamaica and
Venezuela trouble than most of our congressmen ever dreamed of.

Reading is the short cut into the heart of life. If you are talking
with a group of friends about, for example, different parts of the
United States, and some one happens to mention a city or town in which
you have lived, note how your interest quickens, and how eager you are
to hear news of the place or to tell of your experience in it. This is a
simple every-day fact. The same thing you have observed a thousand times
about any subject or talk with which you may be familiar. We learn about
many things just by keeping alive and moving round! Those things we have
learned about we can't help being interested in. That is the way we are
made. If we knew about more things our interests would be greater in
number, keener, more satisfying; we would talk more, ask more questions,
be more alert, get more pleasure.

The lesson from this is plain enough: if you wish to have a good time,
learn something. You like to meet old friends. Your brain, also, likes
to come across things it knows already, to renew acquaintance with the
knowledge it has stored away and half forgotten. The pleasures of
recognition and association; the delights of renewing your friendships
with your own ideas are many, easy to get, never failing. But if you
wish to have interests and delights in good plenty you must know of many
things. If you wish to be happy, learn something.

This sounds like advice to a student