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APPENDIX F 
read as any other good book ; and the volume in question was 
taken because it fulfilled this requirement, its eminent Australian 
author being 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 46 The Virginian,' 1 44 Lin 
McLean, 11 44 Puck of Pook’s Hill, 11 44 Uncle Remus, 11 44 Aaron of the 
Wild Woods, 11 44 Letters of a Self-made Merchant to his Son, 11 
44 Many Cargoes, 11 44 The Gentleman from Indiana, 11 44 David 
Harum, 11 44 The Crisis, 11 44 The Silent Places, 11 44 Marse Chan, 11 
44 Soapy Sponge's Sporting Tour, 11 44 All on the Irish Shore, 11 44 The 
Blazed Trail, 11 44 Stratagems and Spoils, 11 44 Knights in Fustian, 11 
44 Selma, 11 44 The Taskmasters, 11 Edith Wyatt’s 44 Every Man to 
his Humour, 11 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 reading 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 44 The 
Semi-attached Couple 11 —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 44 The Deluge 11 and 
44 Pan Michael" and 44 Flight of a Tartar Tribe 11 because I had 
just finished 44 Fire and Sword 11 ; 44 Moby Dick 11 because I had 
been re-reading 44 Omoo 11 and 44 Typee 11 ; Gogol’s 44 Taras Bulba 11 
because I wished to get the Cossack view of what was described by 
Sienkiewicz from the Polish side ; some of Maurice Jokai and 44 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’ cycle 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 
