People may look at prickly pear, and it will be just prickly pear and nothing more. Or they may look at it and find it full of significances; the mere sight of a prickly pear may call up a chain of incidents, facts, associations. A mind that can thus look out on the common phenomena of life is rich, and all of the years of the person whose mind is thus stored will be more interesting and full. Cabeza de Vaca's _Narrative_, the chronicles of A. J. Sowell, and O. Henry's story are just three samples of southwestern literature that bring in prickly pear. No active-minded person who reads any one of these three samples will ever again look at prickly pear in the same light that he looked at it before he read. Yet prickly pear is just one of hundreds of manifestations of life in the Southwest that writers have commented on, told stories about, dignified with significance. Cotton no longer has the economic importance to Texas that it once had. Still, it is mighty important. In the minds of millions of farm people of the South, cotton and the boll weevil are associated. The boll weevil was once a curse; then it came to be somewhat regarded as a disguised blessing--in limiting production. De first time I seen de boll weevil, He was a-settin' on de square. Next time I seen him, he had all his family dere-- Jest a-lookin' foh a home, jest a-lookin' foh a home. A man dependent on cotton for a living and having that living threatened by the boll weevil will not be much interested in ballads, but for the generality of people this boll weevil ballad--the entirety of which is a kind of life history of the insect--is, while delightful in itself, a veritable story-book on the weevil. Without the ballad, the weevil's effect on economic history would be unchanged; but as respects mind and imagination, the ballad gives the weevil all sorts of significances. The ballad is a part of the literature of the Southwest. But I am assigning too many motives of self-improvement to reading. People read for fun, for pleasure. The literature of the Southwest affords bully reading. "If I had read as much as other men, I would know as little," Thomas Hobbes is credited with having said. A student in the presence of Bishop E. D. Mouzon was telling about the scores and scores of books he had read. At a pause the bishop shook his long, wise head and remarked, "My son, when DO you get time to think?" Two of the best educated men I have ever had the fortune of talking with were neither schooled nor widely read. They were extraordinary observers. One was a plainsman, Charles Goodnight; the other was a borderer, Don Alberto Guajardo, in part educated by an old Lipan Indian.