66 ILLINOIS DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



US With a better purpose, lends weight, furnishes ballast to our craft whereby 

 it miy weather the gusts that strike it ; so that we may feel, as another has 

 said ''though a wide, rough world be around us, yet it lies very low, and a 

 wide rich heaven hangs above us though it hangs very high." 



Neither is there anything incompatible between the keenest relish of the 

 best things in literature and the right-doing of the commonest things of life. 

 To quote one whose life exemplifies his teaching : " The dull boy, who can- 

 not prate science, but who can drive a cart as a cart ought to be driven; or 

 the dull girl who cannot finger a piano, but who can rightly broil a steak, is, 

 in the eye of all true taste, a far more sightly and attractive object than the 

 most learned good-for-nothing in the world." 



The weariness of wash day, or the vexations of line fences and poor 

 crops, will become less when mixed with the instruction and inspiration of 

 a good book. The wearied, worried soul is soothed as by the music of heav- 

 en's far off silver bells with 



"Amid the maddening maze of things, 



And tossed by storm and flood, 

 To one fixed stake my spirit clings, 



I know that God is good ; 

 And so beside the silent sea 



I wait the muffled oar, 

 ]S^o harm from Him can come to me 



On ocean or on shore." 

 Or: 



" Here is the sorrow, the sighing, 



Here are the cloud and the night, 

 Here is the sickness, the dying. 



There are the life and the light. 

 Here are the heart-strings a-tremble, 



And here is the chastening rod ; 

 There is the song and the cymbal. 



And there is our Father and God.''^— Alice Cary, 



One consideration, perhaps the most important, included in the value 

 of a taste for reading, is its influence in forming, or reforming, our tastes. 

 Our ideals of virtue, goodness, enjoyment, purest happiness, depend upon 

 the keenness and scope of our intellectual sight, and these are largely, very 

 largely, determined by our reading. Perhaps I should have said our oppor- 

 tunities for reading. Aside from our days of direct pupilage we read what 

 pleases us, and this repeated choice deepens into the fixedness of habit, and 

 this habitual selection we call taste, which in turn decides what our mental 

 and moral furnishings shall be ; decides whether our Sundays, our holidays, 

 our eveniogs, our spare moments, shall be devoted to that which is gross and 

 foolish, or to the elevating and the wholesome, to the stultifying re-living 

 of business anxieties or to the absorption of elements for real growth. 

 Neither will it be the books we read from a mere sense of duty that will 

 affect our characters. It is only when the soul is warmed and softened by 

 the sunshine of delight that the rosy colors of truth can be stamped lastingly 



