Some dozen years ago there appeared in a magazine a story called "The Little Brother of the Books." It was the story of a small crippled boy who each afternoon went his way to a certain book stall and was always found absorbed in the same book. The book was the "Age of Fable." That he did this is not strange to any one who owns the book and knows it well. There are few compilations in which the richness of a literature is gathered together and retold in a way that will make it endure as a book. Yet this is true of the "Age of Fable." Every student should own an illustrated copy of it, and preferably one that has never been edited. It is told as a story, and a captivating story it is. A quotation from the preface cannot be resisted here: "Our book is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher, but for the reader of English literature, of either sex, who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation. "We trust our young readers will find it a source of entertainment; those more advanced, a useful companion in their reading; those who travel, and visit museums and galleries of art, an interpreter of paintings and sculptures; those who mingle in cultivated society, a key to allusions which are occasionally made; and, last of all, those in advanced life, pleasure in retracing a path of literature which leads them back to the days of their childhood, and revives at every step the associations of the morning of life. "The permanency of these associations is beautifully expressed in the well-known lines of Coleridge: "'The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest, by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished. They live no longer in the faith of reason; But still the heart doth need a language; still Doth the old instinct bring back the old names, Spirits or gods that used to share this earth With man as with their friend; and at this day 'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great And Venus who brings every thing that's fair.'" CHAPTER III BOOKS TO BE OWNED, TO BE READ, AND TO BE REREAD "The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one."--GOLDSMITH.