524 APPENDIX F 



read as any other oood book ; and tlie volume in question was 

 taken because it fulfilled this requirement, its eminent Australian 

 author beino- not only a learned but a brilliant man. 



I as emphatically object to nothing but heavy reading as I do 

 to nothing but light reading, all that is indispensable being that 

 the heavy and the light reading alike shall be both interesting and 

 wholesome. So I have always carried novels with me, including, 

 as a rule, some by living authors, but (unless I had every confidence 

 in the author) only if I had already read the book. Among many, 

 I remember offhand a few such as "The Virginian," "Lin 

 McLean," " Puck of Pook's Hill,'' " Uncle Remus,'' " Aaron of the 

 Wild Woods," "Letters of a Self-made Merchant to his Son," 

 "Many Cargoes," "The Gentleman from Indiana," "David 

 Hnrum," "The Crisis," " Tiie Silent Places," " Marse Chan," 

 " Soapy Sponge's Sporting Tour," " All on the Irish Shore," " The 

 I^lazed Trail," "Stratagems and Spoils," " Kirights in Fustian," 

 "Selma," "'['he Taskmasters," Edith Wyatt's "Every Man to 

 his Humour," the novels and stories of Octave Thanet. I wish I 

 could remember more of them, for, personally, I have certainly 

 profited as much by reading really good and interesting novels and 

 stories as by i-eading anything else ; and from the contemporary 

 ones I have often reached, as in no other way I could have 

 reached, an understanding of how real people feel in certain 

 country districts, and in certain regions of great cities like Chicago 

 and New York. 



Of course I also generally take out some of the novels of those 

 great writers of the past whom one can read over and over again ; 

 and occasionally one by some writer who was not great, like "The 

 Semi-attached Couple " — a charming little early Victorian or pre- 

 Victorian tale, which, I suppose, other people cannot like as I do, 

 or else it would be reprinted. 



Above all, let me insist that the books which I have taken were, 

 and could only be, a tiny fraction of those for which I cared and 

 which I continually read, and that I care for them neither more 

 nor less than for those I left at home. I took " The Deluge" and 

 "Pan Michael" and "Flight of a Tartar Tribe" because I had 

 just finished "Fire and Sword"; "Moby Dick" because I had 

 been re-reading " Omoo " and " Typee "; Gogol's " Taras Bulba " 

 because I wished to get the Cossack view of what was described by 

 Sienkiewicz from the Polish side ; some of Maurice Jokai and " St. 

 Peter's Umbrella " (I am not at all sure about the titles) because 

 my attention at the moment was on Hungary ; and the novels of 

 Topelius when I happened to be thinking of Finland. I took 

 Dumas' cvcle of romances dealing with the French Revolution 

 because I had just finished Carlyle's work thereon, and I felt that 

 of the two the novelist was decidedly the better historian. I took 



