The late Professor Norton pointed out that a taste for literature is a result of cultivation more often than a gift of nature. The years of the elementary school seem to be the time in which cultivation is easiest and the one in which the taste takes deepest root. Vigorous and tactful effort will go far to develop pure taste and abiding taste for books. The present age is more concerned about pure food than about pure books--maybe an exemplification of John Bright's wish that the working-men of England eat bacon rather than read Bacon. The bulky, coarse food of the last century has been displaced by the sealed package of condensed food done according to a formula, and a mystery to the man who eats it. So is it in our books. We do not have the frankness and vulgarity of the eighteenth century; but instead, we have the most studied forms of insinuation, the harm of which was not approached by the coarseness of former times. Many a present-day story makes the ordinary course of life seem uninteresting, a dangerous thing for a book to do, according to Ruskin. The conduct portrayed has in it too much of personal freedom arising out of caprice, breaking too much with traditional right through what a critic once designated as "debauching innuendo and ill favoured love." The book is often spectacular or sullen in tone. It may be melodramatic, leaving the reader rebellious or with a weakened sense of responsibility. Or again, it may be given to boisterous laughter over situations based on personal misfortune or bad manners--the way of the comic supplement. And worst of all, it may become the fashion; that is, a best seller. Its name and some of its motives will probably get to the children through the talk of the parents. Then to persuade the reading public that the pure taste for the healthful story is much more worth while will try the resources of the teacher. Yet that is exactly what should be expected of him--a Herculean task and a most thankless one. To secure a stable as well as a pure taste for things worth while in books should be an aim of the teacher. He must do this in an age when the vaudeville idea is deep-rooted. Variety takes the place of sustained attention. This begets the mood for profligacy. Something new and good is expected to turn up in the shape of a book. In this mood there is nothing to inspire to steady purpose. And it seems that the best thing left for the teacher to do is to "come out strong" on a few good books. Through fortune and misfortune such books will be permanent possessions to their reader.