Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/112

 and hieroglyphics are scrawled across the text making it almost unreadable. As I turn through, I find the dignified Cicero wearing a sombrero and smoking a pipe, and Cæsar with a beard done in India ink. The book has suffered every insult and indignity possible to be thought of by a boy of fourteen. Robert knows more than grandmother did at his age, but neither he nor the children with whom he associates have the love and respect for books that grandmother had as a girl.

As for me I should as soon see a dear friend abused as a book I have worked with and come to know and to understand. I do not mind the ordinary wear of use and age any more than I am annoyed by wrinkles in the faces of my friends who are growing old, but intentional indignities hurt me.

Is it because books are so plentiful or so cheap that we care so little about them? Is it because they cost us now no sacrifice, no struggle, no tender thought or anxious anticipation that we think of them so lightly and toss them about so carelessly? I have heard grandmother tell of how happy she was and how proud when her father first put the little geography into her hands. Neither high school nor college students often feel so today.

The story of Lincoln, unable to find a half dozen books in the community in which he lived and willing to work days in order that he might become the owner of a worn and rain-soaked volume of biography seems almost