Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/126

 it takes to read it. The magazines which our fathers read and which have stood the test for fifty years or more, are still the best, and one of these, at least, you ought to read regularly. A magazine usually announces both the quality and the character of its contents by the refinement and taste of the design on its cover. The quiet ones are the most conservative and the most worth while.

You will have to read some books of the present day; you would be thought ignorant and behind the times otherwise. People will continue to talk about last month's "best sellers," and though very often there is little reason why these books should sell so well, you will miss something if you are unacquainted with them. Your greatest pleasure in reading, however, will be in the books that have stood the test of time—in Scott, and Cooper and Dickens, and Eliot and Thackeray and Hawthorne and Stevenson, of whose infinite variety you can not tire. If you have not already made their acquaintance, you should begin at once. If you have not before this read the most that they have written, you have to look forward to one of the great pleasures of your life.

Since I began the writing of this paper I have been reading aloud Dickens' David Copperfield. I read it first when I was ten with the greatest pleasure and interest; I have read it since a half dozen times, I have no doubt, and yet I think the fact of any former readings adds rather than detracts from the pleasure which I get from it today. As long as I live it will give me joy to go through its chapters.