There is surely no need of saying that rest, amusement and change are necessary in the long run for any kind of work. You save time by taking a vacation. Somebody has said that anyone can do twelve months work in eleven, but that no one can do eleven months’ work in twelve, meaning that we can accomplish more in a year by devoting one month of it to a sensible vacation. There can be no doubt that we can gain much knowledge from books. It is one of the chief sources from which the world gets all that it knows. But is any of this knowledge worth while for a housewife? If anyone doubts it, stop and think. How about the Bible, the newspapers, the cook-book? Is this the only reading from which we can profit? In your own experience surely you can recall at least a few other books that told you something you were glad to know. How do you get _experience_ from reading? Isn’t it safer to learn human beings and their ways by studying them direct? Yes, and no. It depends on the book. Perhaps the author can tell you in a few hours more real truth about men and women than you can learn alone in years. We have heard so many queer things about “literature” that we are likely to think of it as fancy things written by a lot of delicate, long-haired men and masculine women and having very little to do with our own everyday lives. Well, there are many over-cultured and over-educated people who would define literature that way. But they are mightily wrong! The _best_ literature is generally simple, not “fancy.” Literature is the spoken or written record by which each generation of mankind is enabled to preserve the knowledge and experience of the generations before it and to begin where the last one left off instead of having to begin all over again. It doesn’t matter whether it is written or only spoken. Indeed, before man invented the alphabet or even learned to transmit his ideas and feelings by crude, rough pictures there wasn’t any literature except what was spoken or recited. The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” of Homer were sung or recited, long before they were put down on parchment. Our fairy-stories and legends generally date back hundreds and hundreds of years and were preserved only by each generation telling them to the next. In later days, especially during the Middle Ages, many valuable poems and stories, and even more of history, would have been lost to us forever if wandering bards and minstrels had not recited or sung them and taught them to others. There is no way, except literature, by which we can learn from the past. Did you ever think that our generation has, by itself, added only a very, very tiny bit to the knowledge existing in the world when our generation was born? All our great inventions would be impossible without this previous knowledge.