for noses that have long ceased to smell it!

But little pictures in black and white, of little every-day people
like ourselves, by some great little artist who knows life well and
has the means at his command to express his knowledge in this easy,
simple manner, can be taken up and thrown down like the book or
newspaper. They are even easier to read and understand. They are
within the reach of the meanest capacity, the humblest education, the
most slender purse. They come to us weekly, let us say, in cheap
periodicals. They are preserved and bound up in volumes, to be taken
down and looked at when so disposed. The child grows to love them
before he knows how to read; fifty years hence he will love them
still, if only for the pleasure they gave him as a child. He will soon
know them by heart, and yet go to them again and again; and if they
are good, he will always find new beauties and added interest as he
himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and
culture he will owe to them, who can say?

Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can
hold close to the eyes like a book--not even a song or poem--for in
the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than
that of the ear--its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen.
And then there is the immense variety, the number!

[Illustration: "READING WITHOUT TEARS"

TEACHER. "And what comes after S, Jack?"

PUPIL. "T!"