How fine a thing you would think it if you had the privilege of introduction to some great author and could exchange a few words with him! How great an honour if you could enjoy his friendship, and spend an hour with him from time to time in intimate conversation! What a means of culture you would consider it to be! But the power of reading admits you to the society of the wise and great without let or hindrance, and to their society at their best moments. It is often a very disappointing thing to be introduced to the literary hero or heroine of one’s adoration. One expects an utterance equal to the author’s reputation, and there comes instead some commonplace suggested by the surrounding circumstances. We have heard of a young lady devotee taken down to dinner by a great poet, whom to meet had been her dream for years. She listened for his voice in breathless silence, unable to eat for excitement, but he said nothing during soup, fish, entrées; until at length, on the appearance of a fresh course, he remarked, “I like mutton cut in wedges.” Whether the story be true or not, it is a good illustration. On first meeting a stranger it is impossible for the wisest man to drag up from the depths of his being some remark equal to his reputation. There is nothing to call it forth, and it would probably sound affected, or far-fetched, if he began instantly to “talk like a book,” especially like his own books. You cannot get at the inner nature of the man without long friendship, and without a likeness of disposition. But in his book you find him at once, with no tedious preliminary process, at his very best. As Mr. J. R. Lowell has said, the art of reading is the talisman that admits “to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments; that enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.” To the girl, then, who has aspirations, or even a dim stirring of faint desire, after self-culture, we may say, “Read; in the second place, Read; and yet again, Read.” In Matthew Arnold’s published _Letters_, he gives a piece of excellent advice to a young lady who is a relation of his: “If I were you, I should now take to some regular reading, if it were only an hour a day. It is the best thing in the world to have something of this sort as a point in the day, and far too few people know and use this secret. You would have your district still and all your business as usual, but you would have this hour in your day, in the midst of it all, and it would soon become of the greatest solace to you. Desultory reading is a mere anodyne, regular reading, well chosen, is restoring and edifying.” It would be a good thing if every girl would study Ruskin’s _Sesame and Lilies_, and follow the advice therein contained. It has been so often quoted that we hesitate again to transcribe it; but it cannot be read too frequently.