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love or aptitude for meditation. A man with genial interest in his fellows, and in life as a whole, would not have walked the streets of London with a book in his hand; and a man with any faculty of meditative thought would scarcely have employed a long starlit night on the Irish Sea in a recitation of Milton.—, "The Makers of English Prose."

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See.

Book, The Most Popular—See.

BOOKS AND WORTH

Browning would never write for a magazine. He wrote: "I can not bring myself to write for periodicals. If I publish a book, and people choose to buy it, that proves they want to read my work. But to have them to turn over the pages of a magazine and find me—that is to be an uninvited guest."

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Books, Influence of—See.

Books Less Important than Things—See .

BOOKS, POISON IN

A gentleman in India went into his library and took down a book from the shelves. As he did so he felt a slight pain in his finger like the prick of a pin. He thought that a pin had been stuck by some careless person in the cover of the book. But soon his finger began to swell, then his arm, and then his whole body, and in a few days he died. It was not a pin among the books, but a small and deadly serpent.

There are many books that contain moral poison more deadly to character than this serpent. (Text.)

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BOOKS, THE SIZE OF

We are capable of believing, not only that we love books which we do not love, but that we have read books which we have not read. A lifelong intimacy with their titles, a partial acquaintance with modern criticism, a lively recollection of many familiar quotations—these things come in time to be mistaken for a knowledge of the books themselves. Perhaps in youth it was our ambitious purpose to storm certain bulwarks of literature; but we were deterred by their unpardonable length. It is a melancholy truth, which may as well be acknowledged at the start, that many of the books best worth reading are very, very long, and that they can not, without mortal hurt, be shortened. Nothing less than a shipwreck on a desert island in company with Froissart's "Chronicles" would give us leisure to peruse this glorious narrative, and it is useless to hope for such a happy combination of chances. We might, indeed, be wrecked—that is always a possibility—but the volume saved dripping from the deep would be "Soldiers of Fortune," or "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch."—, "Compromises."

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BOORISHNESS

Boorishness is a product of selfishness far more than a product of ignorance; or at least a product of that ignorance which is in itself a product of selfishness. I was once at a wedding breakfast in a rural community in the West. The groom ate in silence the food that was set before him, dispatched his meal before the rest of us were more than half through, pushed back his plate, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and turning to his bride, said, "Well, Sally, you may as well get used to my way at the beginning, and I always leave the table when I have got through with my meal!" With these words he went out to pick his teeth on the door-steps, leaving his bride with a flushed face and a pained heart, the object of our commiseration. The man was a boor, you say. True! What made him a boor? The fact that he selfishly thought of his own comfort. It never entered his head to inquire whether his conduct would be agreeable or painful to his bride.—, The Chautauquan.

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Borrowed Trouble—See.

BORROWING HABIT ARRESTED

A wag has declared that there is one borrower set down in every neighborhood; that she either "leavens the whole lump" (being of the fomenting class) or speedily moves away. But he is mistaken; sometimes the borrower gets converted. Here is the way one woman managed it:

"Ma wants to know if you will loan her a cup of sugar?" asks Mrs. B.'s little girl.

"Why, certainly! But be sure to tell her not to return it," was the cheerful response of Mrs. Neighbor.

The next day the child reappeared with the