Reading is the short cut into the heart of life. If you are talking with a group of friends about, for example, different parts of the United States, and some one happens to mention a city or town in which you have lived, note how your interest quickens, and how eager you are to hear news of the place or to tell of your experience in it. This is a simple every-day fact. The same thing you have observed a thousand times about any subject or talk with which you may be familiar. We learn about many things just by keeping alive and moving round! Those things we have learned about we can't help being interested in. That is the way we are made. If we knew about more things our interests would be greater in number, keener, more satisfying; we would talk more, ask more questions, be more alert, get more pleasure.
The lesson from this is plain enough: if you wish to have a good time, learn something. You like to meet old friends. Your brain, also, likes to come across things it knows already, to renew acquaintance with the knowledge it has stored away and half forgotten. The pleasures of recognition and association; the delights of renewing your friendships with your own ideas are many, easy to get, never failing. But if you wish to have interests and delights in good plenty you must know of many things. If you wish to be happy, learn something.
This sounds like advice to a student. It is not, it is a suggestion to the wayfarer. For this learning process may be as delightful as it is to gather flowers by the roadside in a summer walk.
J. C. DANA.
LIBRARY WORTH SELF-DENIAL
An inexhaustible mine of pleasure is open for the boy or girl who loves good books and has access to them. Without effort on the part of the parent they are kept off the street and from the company of the idle and vicious and are storing their minds with useful knowledge, or are being taught high ideals and noble purposes. Thus they develop into men and women who are an honor to their parents and worthy citizens of our great republic.
Such is the product of a Free Public Library. Is it not worth the small pittance it will cost? Many a laboring man spends more money in a week for tobacco than the maintenance of a library would cost him in a year. Is not the education and the development of our bright boys and girls worth a little self-denial?
We all desire that our children shall have better opportunities than we have had, and not have to work as we have worked. Here is an opportunity to help them help themselves, which is the very best help that can be given any one. Let's be "boosters" and help ourselves, help our town, and help our boys and girls by unitedly supporting the library proposition.
IOWA LIBRARY COMMISSION.