A library has been termed by Lord Lytton a “literary pharmacopœia” which contains the remedies for mental and moral shortcomings. Modified to suit the requirements of boyhood it means that doses of literature should be administered as specifics for diseases of character, as well as to act as tonics to build up the moral virtues. For the boy inclined to deceit books are prescribed in which truthfulness and honor are exalted; for the lazy boy is prescribed the tale of monumental achievement through industry; the anemic bookworm should receive a course of reading concerning athletics, sports, and life in the open; disloyalty and disobedience would call for a diet of stories in which the antithesis of these defects is exploited. In a word, it is an attempt to correct his moral and temperamental deficiencies by placing him under the influence of the heroic characters of fiction who exhibit the moral qualities which the boy lacks. This device is no longer a mere theory; it has been tried in innumerable instances and always with good, if variable, results. The effectiveness of this unique plan will doubtless be in proportion to the skill of the diagnostician in recognizing the exact moral ailment and the accuracy of the literary physician in prescribing the corrective reading. Every boy admires a hero and seeks to emulate him. If his hero is one of questionable morals, the effect of his companionship on the boy reader will be almost as pernicious as the influence of an evil chum in daily life. On the other hand, companionship with the noble characters of fiction cultivates in the reader the same virtues as those exhibited by the hero and inevitably establishes moral standards. When the boy demands that virtue shall be rewarded and vice punished it is an evidence of his ethical evolution, and the continued recurrence of these instances in his reading finally fixes for all time his criterion of moral values. The dust-covered books which formerly filled the shelves of our Sunday-school libraries depicting milk-and-water characters and heroes of immaculate goody-goodyness, happily, have been replaced by books portraying virile, red-blooded, intensely human heroes who are not afraid to get their clothes dirty. No dust ever accumulates on such books but they do become worn and soiled with constant reading. Stories of animal life are valuable when informative of their customs and habits and they generally inspire a love for animal heroes which prompts a manifestation of kindness toward all dumb creatures. Not infrequently the hidden moral contained in these stories is driven home as forcibly as in the best fiction in which human beings play the principal rôles.