Another good remark somebody made once is that if you own books you do not have to read them. That is, if you hear of a certain book, you say, "I must get that out of the library and read it." If you do so, it is necessary to read it at once and return it. If you can buy it, you read what portion satisfies your particular want at the moment, and then there it stands among your other good friends, always ready, like any real friend, to serve you at a moment's notice in any way it can. Indeed, it is a real friend, because it never deserts you, never goes back on you, never changes, unless somebody borrows it, and that is not the book's fault. The mere fact that your room is filled with books is a good kind of influence, for there is something in the mere proximity of books that makes a chap serious occasionally, and induces him to sit and ponder once in a while in the midst of his grind, his sport, his daily work, and his other and less valuable friends at school or college. Then, too, in these days, when there are so many hundreds of books a year and so many millions already published, it is utterly impossible to try to read, as the old fellows in the later Middle Ages used to, everything that is published. It is far better to re-read some good familiar things again and again. They are good books, they are your especial favorites, and you will seldom fail to find something new in them each time you read them. It gives you a little idea of how much the writing of them must have meant to their author if you can read them, say, twenty times, and still go on finding something you had not succeeded in discovering in them before. Some day you will go to call upon a friend who is perhaps a good deal older than you are, and finding him in his library, you will walk in and come upon him standing at his bookshelves, with a volume in his hand. As he stops reading or examining a book, he will sit down, talking with you and handling the book carefully, smoothing down its outside cover, or gently feeling the leaves between his thumb and forefinger. Then, as he gets up to take down a book to show you, he will gently blow off the dust from the top, in order that as he opens it no dirt shall go down between the leaves, there to remain and work ruin like sand-paper. Such a man understands books and has an affection for them. He may be a busy merchant; he may be a lawyer; he may be a bookworm; but in all three cases he is sure to be a refined, educated, more or less scholarly man, because no one can live in the company of good books long and be otherwise. It is a good plan for a schoolboy to begin to make his library at once. Money spent in good books is never wasted, and no sensible parent will check a reasonable desire for them. At college the library will increase, and before you know it you will be starting in on your work of life with one little room in your bachelor apartments or your family home that is just as good as a teacher--better in many ways.