It is an odd reflection how silent a book may seem when it is waiting on a shelf to be read. But once its covers are opened, and our eyes follow the lines of print for page after page, voices speak, people that we had not known before become familiar to us or old friends give us greeting; thoughts, knowledge, events, pass from the silent pages into our minds. Some books possess this property of rich and glowing life in a high degree. No books surely have it more abundantly than the novels of Charles Dickens. Here are scores of friends for us, playmates, companions. If anyone has a fit of loneliness, or should anyone be looking for change and variety, let him open one of Dickens' novels. Which one will he choose first? A boy or girl is well advised who takes, shall we say, _David Copperfield_ or _Pickwick Papers_. One or the other will make an excellent beginning. Having read one, or both, it is unlikely that the reader will refrain from adding five, six, seven, eight, or even twelve more novels by Dickens to the list of books he is happy to remember having read. What are the names of Dickens' other better known novels? _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Oliver Twist_, _The Old Curiosity Shop_, _Barnaby Rudge_, _Martin {4} Chuzzlewit_, _Dombey and Son_, _Bleak House_, _Little Dorrit_, _A Tale of Two Cities_, _Great Expectations_, _Our Mutual Friend_. But still we must add the Christmas books, for no one, old or young, should lose the benefit of having read _A Christmas Carol_. And there is also the unfinished novel _Edwin Drood_, probably more talked of still than any other story of a mystery, new or old. It is nearly sixty years since Dickens left the story incomplete, but how gladly many people still would discover the secret ending that the great novelist had planned in his mind. Once read, Dickens' novels cling to the memory. The characters he made inhabit this world of ours as substantially, it seems, as people do who have been born not from imagination merely. As lately as the spring of 1928 a London hotel, the Adelphi, changed owners. In a brief history of the place a list of persons was given who had visited it, ending with the remark that Mr. Pickwick had had his first dinner there after being released from prison. The other people mentioned were what we describe as historical characters. Mr. Pickwick, although thousands of people know him so well that if they met him on the street they could not possibly fail to recognize him, is the miraculous product of Dickens' imagination. If you have not read _Pickwick Papers_, in a few hours you too may know Mr. Pickwick, and he will be for you also a lifetime friend.