From the consideration of these facts, two conclusions follow—first, that for the intellectual uplifting of the colored race it is absolutely essential that the reading habit be established in some way; and, second, that it should be the active endeavor of all the missionary schools to devise and employ the best agencies for stimulating and establishing this habit. Now comes the practical question, What are the instrumentalities by which we can implant and cultivate the love of profitable and elevating reading? Of course, something may be done in the regular course of instruction. Reading in school may be so taught as to give real culture of taste and appreciation. The sips of good literature found in the reading-books may be so used as to create a desire to drink freely at the fountain-head; though it is to be confessed that many teachers fail lamentably in this direction. The student of history or geography may and should be pushed out of his text-book into the wide field from which text-books are gleaned. Yet all this has much of the flavor of the daily task about it. Can anything be done to make the act of reading more spontaneous, to make it seem more like an indulgence and a recreation than an exaction and a duty? The answer need not be a negative. It is to be found in reading-rooms, wisely placed and planned. And much stress is to be laid on these qualifications. The first requisite for a reading-room is accessibility. It must be placed where it can be got at easily and continually. A locked-up library, open only once or twice a week at a stated hour, with the issue of books held under formal regulations is utterly futile as a means of creating the reading habit; it is useful only for those who have the habit already formed. A reading-room must not only be conveniently placed where the pupils can not escape it, as it were, but it must also be open at all times; so that in all the moments of leisure, whether in the hours set apart for labor or those for recreation, there may be the freest access, that even “he that runs” may read a little. It, therefore, becomes almost a necessity in a boarding-school that there be two reading-rooms, one for each sex. The second requirement for success is that the reading matter be well chosen, selected with regard to the ends in view. It is absurd to suppose that reading matter so stale, dull or obstruse as to have no longer any value among a reading people should be worth sending to a people who have not yet learned to read. Musty libraries of defunct ministers are even more useless in a freedmen’s school than at the North. Discarded Sunday-school books are little better; for in any library the readable books are worn to pieces before the rest are given away. Old files of religious or other newspapers have their uses; but to make a reading-room tempting is not one of them.