Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/61

 miring the picture she made and studying the changing expressions of her face. He saw it suddenly brighten as if she had solved a problem, and now she looked at him, seeking consent.

“Then suppose, when we return to Venice, we give it to Pietro. Would that do?”

“I suppose it would,” he agreed, and then added with a smile, “But he, being a poet, an antiquary, and a patriot, will probably give it back to his only permanent love—Venice.”

And time proved his judgment; for Pietro did!

“Seward’s Folly,” a book-length novel of Alaska by Edison Marshall, complete in the next issue.

S dry as the dictionary!” Something ought to be done to correct the regrettable effect of that hoary but far from venerable epithet. It is the purest slander, We know of no more engaging and withal improving companion for the passing of a vagrant idle hour than that same maligned and unoffending volume.

We have not yet completed our list of ten books to take with us into the well-known hypothetical seclusion of a desert retreat. But we are sure of three of them. The first two are, of course, the universal choice—the Bible and Shakespeare. The third, we proclaim without an instant’s hesitation, is the dictionary. We have seen many lists of “ten books” and in one or another of them we have found books we should like to have by us if we were condemned to solitude, but nowhere have we found mention of Noah Webster’s best seller. And we find it hard to understand why this should be. We have seldom encountered any book so universal in its appeal, so sympathetic to every mood, so delightfully varied and unexpected as the dictionary. We have heard it said that Rudyard Kipling used to spend his vacations with no other book than the dictionary. We do not know if this is strictly true, but we can very well credit it.

Consider what the dictionary has to offer. It gives you words, to start with, words whose existence you may never have suspected, or have known and forgotten; words that evoke new ideas and set your imagination careering down strange and delectable byways that lead to venturesome conjecturings in dim and distant realms, ahead in the hidden future, behind in the storied past, afar in fabulous countries of the present. It gives you new meanings for old words, old words for new meanings. It takes you back to the roots of the language and shows you how this English we speak is a composite of the tongues of Homer and Vergil and the troubadors of Normandy and the bards of the Saxon and the Celt. It gives you facts too, facts about people and places, facts about strange animals, birds, and reptiles of whom you, perhaps, never heard, facts about scientific things like electrons and atoms and metals with strange names and properties, yttrium, for instance. If this is dry stuff then champagne is bottled dust.

Reading in the dictionary is like poking about in a strange neighborhood or an unfamiliar country. Interesting things appear so unexpectedly. You wander idly down a page, mouthing over and rejecting words whose story is an old one to you, when suddenly your eye lights on one that is startlingly new and attractive. You turn it over, contemplate it, digest it, resolve to make it your own, and then it suggests some other line of inquiry and you turn the pages until your curiosity in the new direction is satisfied and a fresh curiosity takes its place, and so on, with never an end to the excursion until you are minded to end it. That is another excellent point about reading in the dictionary. There is no definite objective toward which you must hurry. You may take your own sweet time, stopping here, detouring there, doubling on your tracks if you wish, just as though you were wandering reflectively through some quaint old town peering into little lighted shop windows, staring at the fretted facades of ancient chapels and cathedrals, venturing down dimly lit side streets where ancient houses watch you as you idle by, with nowhere in particular to go until the curfew, or an agreeable drowsiness, calls you back to your bed in the little inn.

Give your dictionary a trial. It will amply repay the expenditure of an hour of any man’s spare time. You will find it isn’t very dusty, after all.