Among the books that have come down to us from the past we can choose pretty safely. If they have lived this long we can be sure there is something worth while in them. I know a few sensible women, some of them with both time and money, who make it a rule never to read any book until it has been published a year. If at the end of that period it is still interesting other people, then they buy it, being pretty sure that it must have at least some small merit. They say it is surprising how very few books do remain in the public attention that long. Now I know just what will happen. Some of you know all I have been saying as well as I do, but some one is sure to say: “Oh, yes, that’s all true enough, I suppose, but when I find time to read, I don’t want to wade through anything heavy.” Nobody asked you to. Books aren’t “heavy” just because they are good. Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “Marjorie Daw” and “The Story of a Bad Boy,” Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “Innocents Abroad” are certainly far, far from being heavy; so are Charles Kingsley’s “Water Babies,” De Foe’s “Robinson Crusoe;” so are Dr. Brown’s “Rab, and His Friends,” Ouida’s “A Dog of Flanders,” though both bring tears to the eyes; so are the poems of Robert Burns and Longfellow; so are Æsop’s “Fables,” the stories of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page; so are hundreds of others. Yet all these just named are good literature. If by “heavy” you mean only things that are dull or hard to understand, the list of good books that are not “heavy” grows tremendously, and there are still others that may be hard to understand in places but are nevertheless interesting enough to “amuse” you all the way through. Shakespeare, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Poe, Tennyson, Stevenson, Dickens, Thackeray, Whittier, Helen Hunt Jackson, Hugh Conway, Bret Harte, Augusta J. Evans, Louisa M. Alcott and scores besides are more than “worth while.” If there are now and then dull or difficult pages in some of them yet they are all the world away from being “heavy.” Reading for amusement only is much better than not reading at all. We need amusement. But there is one danger. If what we read for amusement happens to be poor literature it is _not true to life_ and you are learning things about yourself and others that are not true and may lead you into mistakes some day. You know what dime novels—Wild West and detective stories—will do to young people. It isn’t only because they are exciting and deal with crime, but because they give false ideas of life and false ideals. There are thousands of books, apparently harmless enough, that will hurt grown people as much as dime novels hurt the children. There are plenty of books you can read “just for amusement” which are also very good literature and very good teachers of life. Why waste time on the poor ones?