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Serious ReadingYoung readers often suppose things very difficult to understand which really are quite easy, and consequently they continue to read only stories long after they would find as much pleasure in acquiring knowledge that would be both useful and entertaining. There are simple books on nearly all great subjects, about which young people ought to know something.

Architecture, for example, will furnish material for a lifetime of hard study, but there is no reason why you should not learn something of that marvelous art that has created so many beautiful structures throughout the world. One can easily learn a little about the different styles, how they began, and how they rose from the rude huts of peasants to palaces and cathedrals. A little reading on the subject now and then will soon give you more interest in every building you see. Once begun, you will find your pleasure will lead you to go on. Other subjects may be taken up in the same way, for all knowledge, nowadays, lies in books and is open to every reader. Many boys love ships, but very few think of taking up the study of ships from the beginning. Here, again, you will find it useful, as often recommended in this department, to apply to your elders for advice. Nearly all older readers wish they were younger so that they might read on many subjects they neglected when they had more time for reading. You, who are still young, might begin in time.

The New Year is an excellent time for making good resolutions.

News from
Africa When Livingstone was in Africa the greater part of the central region was entirely unknown and uncivilized. Even later than Livingstone’s day, there was no such thing as a native who could read in all that vast domain. But to-day the newspapers tell of receiving photographs from Uganda, on the north shore of Victoria Nyanza, one showing school-boys sitting on the earth floor of their school-room, busied over their readers and other text-books, another in which natives are learning to write, another showing a book-shop besieged by forty or fifty eager buyers of the books on sale. About fifty thousand natives can now read and write in the very kingdom where less than twenty years ago it was punished as a crime to attempt to learn to read.

All this, it is said, came from an appeal made in 1875, by the late Sir Henry M. Stanley, the “White Pasha,” for missionaries and teachers. The facts here given are from a recent article in the New York “Sun,” and are interesting as showing how reading can civilize a whole nation. It is to be hoped that these natives will be taught what to read as well as how to read, for there is as much need of one art as of the other.

Parkman’s Deed
of Justice.A story is told about Francis Parkman, the historian, which shows that in spite of impaired eyesight he was not blind to injustice. A friend met him walking along the street, holding two street boys by their coat collars. In reply to his friend’s request for an explanation Parkman said; “I found this boy had eaten an apple without dividing with his little brother. Now I ’m going to buy one for the little boy, and make the big one look on while he eats it.”

After reading this incident, we should expect fairness of treatment in Parkman’s histories.

Two Kinds of
ReadingIf we make the pages of our books merely a sort of pleasant maze in which to set our minds to wandering during idle hours, we in reading shall have acquired a pastime that is usually harmless. But there is a vast difference between such a way of spending our time, and the reading that teaches us to think as the greatest and wisest men and women have thought. Words stand in our minds for certain ideas or images. From what we read we learn to make these plain or hazy, clearly drawn pictures or carelessly executed sketches, and thus our powers of thinking are directly trained by our method of reading.