book in anticipation, and they pick up a newspaper or a magazine, not
because they specially want to read it, but because they have nothing
present to their minds or at hand which they really care for. The habit
of planning ahead is essential to real cultivation of the pleasure of
reading, just as essential as planning is for sport or travel or games
or any of the other pleasures of life. I know friends who are fond of
sport. They choose a long time beforehand the river they will fish or
the sort of shooting they will pursue. Another friend likes travel and
plans months in advance where he will go and what he will see. Without
this fore-thought and planning they would not get their pleasure, and so
it is with reading. If we once acquire the habit of planning, we find
out increasingly what it is that we like, and our difficulty at any
spare moment is not to find some book that we are longing to read, but
to choose which book of those to which we are looking forward in
anticipation we shall take first.

I have spoken about planning for a holiday, and I will give an instance
of how thoroughly President Roosevelt planned for a holiday. Several
years ago when I was at the Foreign Office in London, I got a letter
from Mr. Bryce, who was then British Ambassador at Washington, saying
that President Roosevelt intended to travel as soon as he was out of
office. He was going to travel in Africa, to visit Europe, and to come
to England, and he was planning his holiday so minutely as to time his
visit to England for the spring, when the birds would be in full song
and he could hear them. For this purpose he wanted it to be arranged
that somebody who knew the songs of the English birds should go for a
walk with him in the country, and as the songs were heard tell him what
the birds were. That is a pretty good instance of thorough planning in
advance for a holiday. It seemed to me very attractive that the
executive head of the most powerful country in the world should have