Usually, of course, a book that is worth reading at all is worth reading carefully. Thoroughness of reading is the first thing to preach and to practice, and it is perhaps dangerous to suggest to a beginner that any book should be skimmed. The suggestion will serve its purpose if it indicates that there are ways to read, that practice in reading is like practice in anything else; the more one does, and the more intelligently one does it, the farther and more easily one can go. In the best reading--that is, the most thoughtful reading of the most thoughtful books, attention is necessary. It is even necessary that we should read some works, some passages, so often and with such close application that we commit them to memory. It is said that the habit of learning pieces by heart is not so prevalent as it used to be. I hope that this is not so. What! have you no poems by heart, no great songs, no verses from the Bible, no speeches from Shakespeare? Then you have not begun to read, you have not learned how to read. We have said enough, perhaps, of the theories of reading. The one lesson that seems most obvious is that we must come close to literature. Therefore we shall pause no longer on general considerations, but enter at once the library where the living books are ranged upon the shelves. CHAPTER III THE READING OF FICTION Our reason for considering prose fiction before the other departments of literature is not that fiction is of greatest importance, but that it is the branch of literature most widely known and enjoyed. Pretend as we may to prefer poetry and “solid books” (as if good fiction lacked solidity!) most of us have read more novels than histories, more short stories than poems. The good old Quaker who wrote a dull history of Nantucket could not understand why the young people preferred novels to his veracious chronicle; which was the same as saying that he did not understand young people, or old people, either. Since the beginning of recorded human history the world has gathered eagerly about the knees of its story-tellers, and to the end of the race it will continue to applaud and honor the skillful inventor of fiction.