When it is remembered that during these years the desire for reading is so great that it will be satisfied, surreptitiously if not openly, that the heroes and heroines strengthen ideals of their own type in the soul of the child, that these are the years in which taste is being formed, not only in reading but in living, nurture again has a great task outlined. "What is the best way to keep a boy from eating green apples?" a prominent Sunday School worker often asks in a convention. The answer never varies: "Give him ripe ones to eat." The child who has plenty of well-selected, wholesome literature will have no appetite for the baneful. Biography of the heroic type, exploration, adventure and charming romances like the "Waverley Novels" will help to lay sane and pure foundations of character. The missionary boards are now putting out books as thrilling and stirring in their situations as any yellow-backed novel. These the children devour and the spiritual heroism makes its silent appeal along with the physical. This delight in reading makes comparatively easy the formation of the habit of daily Bible reading. If the life is more than meat, then the time taken by the father or mother to select fascinating Bible biographies and stories, and tactfully to supervise the reading, is at least as wisely expended as that used in training a grape vine or sewing a lace edge on a ruffle. Is it not strange that there is such distorted perspective and false balance of values in regard to what is worth while? The cares of this world crowd out so many supreme things. Many a temptation in later life would have its antidote if the Holy Spirit could bring the needed Scripture to mind, but because some one substituted the lesser for the greater, solicitude for external appearance instead of inner furnishing, the Word is not there to be recalled. HABIT FORMATION The discussion of these marked characteristics of the life is given added import when we realize that these years are in the height of the habit forming period. All through Early Childhood and Childhood every act has left its faint tracing upon the plastic cells of the brain, and some of the markings are deep ere now. Just as water will follow its channel rather than cut a new course, so activity will expend itself in the well-traced pathways unless prevented from so doing, and the same thought or stimulus will always tend to go out in the same action. No thinking is necessary upon these habitual acts which constitute "nine tenths of life"--they have become mechanical. Not only in the body does life acquire fixed habits, but also in the soul, in thinking, feeling and choosing.