In the quest for culture, in the desire to improve your mind by close association with the great writers of all literature, do not be discouraged because you may have had little school training. The schools and the universities have produced only a few of the immortal writers. The men who speak to you with the greatest force from the books into which they put their living souls have been mainly men of simple life. The splendid stimulus that they give to every reader of their books sprang from the education of hard experience and the culture of the soul. The writers of these books yearned to aid the weak and heavy-laden and to bind up the wounds of the afflicted and sorely stricken. Can one imagine any fame so great or so enduring as the fame of him who wrote hundreds of years ago words that bring tears to one's eyes today--tears that give place to that passionate ardor for self-improvement, which is the beginning of all real culture? And another point is to guard against losing the small bits of leisure scattered through the day. Don't take up a magazine or a newspaper when you have fifteen minutes or a half hour of leisure alone in your room. Keep a good book and make it a habit to read so many pages in the time that is your own. Cultivate rapid reading, with your mind intent on your book. You will find in a month that you have doubled your speed and that you have fixed in your mind what you have read, and thus made it a permanent possession. If you persist in this course, reading always as though you had only a few moments to spare and concentrating your mind on the page before you, you will find that reading becomes automatic and that you can easily read thirty pages where before ten pages seemed a hard task. Long years ago it was my custom to reach home a half hour before dinner. To avoid irritability which usually assailed me when hungry, I took up Scott and read all the Waverley novels again. It required barely a year, but those half hours made at the end of the period eight whole days. In the same way in recent years I have reread Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling and Hardy, because I wanted to read something as recreation which I would not be forced to review. Constant practice in rapid reading has given me the power of reading an ordinary novel and absorbing it thoroughly in four hours. This permits of no dawdling, but one enjoys reading far better when he does it at top speed. Macaulay in his memoirs tells of the mass of reading which he did in India, always walking up and down his garden, because during such exercise his mind was more alert than when sitting at a desk.