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There will be spread out before us — ours for the 

 asking — enough object lessons to make every one of us 

 for the rest of his life a man or woman of the highest 

 and most varied intelligence equipped with the most 

 liberal education that could possibly be acquired in or 

 out of an university, and whether it means all that to 

 us, or whether it simply means an enormous, tiresome 

 stupid aggregation of things, with no life in them, 

 depends upon our capacity for digesting them as we 

 mentally take them in. 



Somebody (not Emerson) has said that some folks can 

 see more through a key-hole than some others can 

 through a telescope, and so they can, and it is because 

 the eye that peers through the key-hole is backed by a 

 brain that recognizes a thing when it sees it. We can't 

 expect to go to the Fair and assimilate all the thousand 

 things we shall see, but years hence, when our grand- 

 children ask us " What did you see at the World's Fair 

 in 1893?" we don't want to be obliged to say "I 

 can't remember a single thing, but a lot of big Norman 

 horses," or " a beautiful crazy quilt," or even the " Dairy 

 school," and the number of different things we shall 

 remember will be exactly in proportion to the number 

 of different subjects we have made it a point to study 

 beforehand. 



I am glad to be informed that you have a good 

 library in your town, and no doubt the officers will take 

 pains during the next year and a half to see that it is 

 supplied with such books as you need, not dry, heavy 

 books, but books which like Miss Edwards' "Thousand 

 Miles up the Nile," or Edward E. Hale's boys' book, 

 " A Flight Through Egypt," will put life into a number 

 and deep meaning into a pyramid , or Hawthorne's 

 " Marble Faun," which will send you with eager feet to 



