wings, then
sink into slumber, to awake a blithe, light-hearted boy again.

All was silent now. He could not sleep. His fancy was too wide awake.
Was Uncle Benjamin right, or Jamie the Scotchman? Had he a chance?

CHAPTER XVI.

"A BOOK THAT INFLUENCED THE CHARACTER OF A MAN WHO LED HIS AGE."

"YOU must read good books," said Benjamin Franklin's godfather. "How
sorry I am that I had to sell my pamphlets!"

Books have stamped their character on young men at the susceptible age
and the turning points of life. But their influence for good or evil
comes to receptive characters. "He is a genius," says Emerson, "who
gives me back my own thoughts." The gospel says, "He that hath ears to
hear, let him hear."

Abraham Lincoln would walk twenty miles to borrow a law book, and would
sit down on a log by the wayside to study it on his return from such a
journey. Horace Greeley says that when he was a boy he would go reading
to a woodpile. "I would take a pine knot," he said, "put it on the back
log, pile my books around me, and lie down and read all through the long
winter evenings." He read the kind of books for which his soul hungered.
He read to find in books what he himself wished to be. A true artist
sees and hears only what he wishes to see and hear. An active, earnest,
resolute soul reads only that which helps him fulfill the haunting
purpose of his life. Almost every great man's books that were his
companions in early years were pictures of what he most wished to be
and to do.

How many men have had their spiritual life quickened by a hymn! How many
by a single poem! Homer and Ossian filled the imagination of Napoleon.
Plutarch's Lives has helped form the characters of a thousand heroes,
and Emerson placed Plutarch next to the Bible in the rank of beneficent
influences. We would say to every boy, Read Plutarch; read the best
books first.

A few books well read would be an education. Let a boy read the Bible,
Josephus, Plutarch's Lives, Rawlinson's, Hallam's Macaulay's,
Bancroft's, and Prescott's histories, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and
Longfellow, and he would have a basis of knowledge of such substantial
worth and moral and literary standard as to cause his intelligence to be
respected everywhere and to become a power. Yet all these books could be
purchased for twenty-five dollars, and the time that many waste in
unprofitable reading for three years would be sufficient to master them.

"I am a part of all th