After the play comes the work, but the work may be made as interesting as the play and may proceed in the same spirit of jollity and freedom that marked the time given up wholly to amusement. The work is the second factor in the father's influence--something on the plane of the child's own mind, not too difficult, not too long continued. Closely related, too, it must be with things that the child has done and understands. Some phase of school work may need to be carried on by the older ones in the family, but the younger boys are free to work with the father in anything that will stimulate and inspire. What shall the work be? To every one who has had to do with a large number of children the answer comes quickly enough. _In reading and conversation will the boy and his father come most closely together_, in a field that is attractive to both and where it is as easy to find entertainment and pleasure as it is to gain information and culture. Two quotations from men of good judgment come into mind at this point. Arthur T. Hadley, recently President of Yale University, has said, "Men in every department of practical life, men in commerce, in transportation or in manufactures, have told me that what they really wanted from our college was men who have this selective power of using books efficiently. The beginnings of knowledge are best learned in any home fairly well furnished with books." Professor William Mathews has added, "It is not the number of books which a young man reads that makes him intelligent and well-informed, but the number of well-chosen ones that he has mastered so that every valuable thought in them is a familiar friend." In those two quotations the ideas of prime importance to every father are, first, that the beginnings of knowledge are best learned in the home; and, second, that it is the mastery of what is read that really counts. In school a child learns to read; at his home he reads to learn. At school he learns how he ought to read; but it is at his home that he learns to read in that manner. What a boy does in school is a small part of the total amount of his reading, and its influence is small indeed. In home reading, then, reading of the right material in the right way, is to be found the great influence in education and the great factor in the building of character.