I For One, When The Public Schools Began All Through The Rural Districts, Thought That At Last The Printing-Press Was Going To Reach The Country People.

In a measure it has done so, but in a flickering, uncertain manner; they read odd bits which come drifting to their homes in irregular ways, just as people on the coast light their fires with fragments of wreck, chance-thrown by the stormy spring-tides on the beach.

So the fire of the mind in country places is fed with chips and splinters, and shapeless pieces that do not fit together, and no one sits down to read. I think I see two reasons why country people do not read, the first of which, thanks be to Allah, will endure for ever; the second may perhaps disappear in time, when those who make books come to see what is wanted.

First, nature has given them so much to read out of doors, such a vast and ever-changing picture-book, that white paper stained with black type indoors seems dry and without meaning. A barnyard chanticleer and his family afford more matter than the best book ever written. His coral red comb, his silvery scaled legs, his reddened feathers, and his fiery attitudes, his jolly crow, and all his ways - there's an illustrated pamphlet, there's a picture-block book for you in one creature only! Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled eggs, the feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present terror of the red wood-dog (as the gipsies call the fox) - here's a Chronicon Nurembergense with a thousand woodcuts; a whole history.

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