There is no section, State or town so poor that its people cannot find something to read when they want it. The inhabitants of a township whose centre is nothing but a post-office, a store and a blacksmith shop, may be too poor to buy a paper of pins, unless they have credit with the storekeeper, but they always are able to find something to read. If there is nothing else, they can fall back upon the Sunday-school books, and nowadays Sunday-school libraries are not as bad as they used to be. Almost any book that is respectable and has any feature of interest can be worked into a Sunday-school library by an enterprising publisher. A Methodist parson, who was congratulated a short time ago on his great success in organizing a Sunday-school in a sparsely settled district in one of the Western States, said, with a long sigh: “These children don’t come here to learn the truths of the Gospel; they come to get books for their families to read during the week.” Perhaps the old man was right in his fear that the religious work of his parish was not going on as well as he wished; he certainly was entirely correct regarding the demand for the books. Children who were dull and listless while the prayers and singing and lessons were going on brightened up quickly when the librarians came in to distribute the books which had been asked for, and the worst boys in town would cheerfully forego base-ball, swimming parties, watermelon stealing, cock-fighting and card-playing for an hour or two on Sunday for the sake of borrowing a book upon which to spend the spare hours of the week that was to follow. A good many people were drawn to Jesus by the loaves and fishes, but books are the most successful bait of the modern church. But the Sunday-school library is the most modest of the many sources from which the poorer class of Americans draw their reading matter. There are at least a dozen series of novels being published in the United States at the present time on a plan which enables the publishers to dodge the postal laws regarding printed matter by assuming to be serial publications. Under the law any book sent out by a publisher should pay postage at the rate of half a cent an ounce; but a library, so called, may send out its publications under the rules governing serials of every kind, which can be paid for at the post-office at the rate of two cents per pound; consequently for several years there has been an absolute inundation of fiction. Stimulated by this feature of the law, a number of enterprising men have reprinted all the standard novels of the past century in cheap form and distributed them broadcast over the entire country; and, to do them justice, have also issued a number of histories and other standard works in the same manner, and as people have purchased them, it is reasonable to suppose that they have read them.