beyond all the glories of Solomon, in aptness of allusion and in fitness of application. Much of the best that appears in the daily press is of this kind. Along with a good deal that is worthy of long life, there is a host of admirable material in the ephemeral paragraphs that we are accustomed to despise. We may despise them, but still we read; and nothing that is read with interested attention by fifty millions of people is really despicable. The average newspaper writer may well be content to toss off paragraphs for us; he need not care who constructs our leading editorials. The influence of the paragraph is incomparably the greater; it has the raciness of the soil, shrewd wit driven home with our native exaggeration and the sting of the epigram. And much of that which is bound between covers has this peculiar aroma of journalism--its fitness to-day, its staleness to-morrow. This sort of thing may be badly done or it may be well done--inconceivably apt, dainty and well-flavored. If it is of the best, why may we not love it, though it be to-morrow as flat as the sparkling wine without its gaseous brilliancy? To those who have been accustomed to books from childhood, who have lived with them and among them, who constantly read them and read about them, they seem to be a part of the natural order of things. It is something of a shock then when we awake, as we all must occasionally, to the realization that to a very large proportion of our population, supposedly educated, they are a thing apart--pedantic, useless, silly; to be borne with during a few years of schooling and then cast aside; to be studied perfunctorily but never to be read. When the statistics of reading are analyzed I believe we shall be startled, not by the great increase in it, notable and indubitable as this is, but at the enormous amount of progress that still remains to be made before the use of books by our people indicates any real general interest in them and appreciation of them. An attitude toward books that is very general is indicated by a series of cartoons which has now been running for several years in a New York evening paper--a proof that its subject must strike a responsive chord, for the execution of the pictures is beneath contempt. It is entitled “Book-Taught Bilkins,” and it sets forth how on one occasion after another Bilkins relies on the information that he finds in a book--and meets with a disaster. This is a trifle, but it is one of those straws that tell which way the wind blows. A presumably intelligent man, a graduate of the public schools, occupying a position under the city, recently remarked to one of our library people that he spent his holidays usually at one of the nearby recreation parks. “Why don’t you go sometimes to one of the branches of the public library?” he was asked. He laughed and said, “I’ve never read a book yet, and I don’t think I’ll start now.” How many are there like him? We are educating them by thousands.