Lastly, it is a disgrace to read even the newspaper, without knowing
where the places are which are spoken of. You need, therefore, the very
best atlas you can provide yourself with. The atlas you had when you
studied geography at school is better than none. But if you can compass
any more precise and full, so much the better. Colton's American Atlas is
good. The large cheap maps, published two on one roller by Lloyd, are
good; if you can give but five dollars for your maps, perhaps this is the
best investment. Mr. Fay's beautiful atlas costs but three and a half
dollars. For the other hemisphere, Black's Atlas is good. Rogers's,
published in Edinburgh, is very complete in its American maps. Stieler's
is cheap and reliable.

When people talk of the "books which no gentleman's library should be
without," the list may be boiled down, I think--if in any stress we should
be reduced to the bread-and-water diet--to such books as will cover these
five fundamental necessities. If you cannot buy the Bible, the agent of
the County Bible Society will give you one. You can buy the whole of
Shakespeare for fifty cents in Dicks's edition. And, within two miles of
the place where you live, there are books enough for all the historical
study I have prescribed. So, in what I now go on to say, I shall take it
for granted that we have all of us made thus much preparation, or can make
it. These are the central stores of the picnic, which we can fall back
upon, after our explorations in our various lines of literature.

Now for our several courses of reading. How am I to know what are your
several tastes, or the several lines of your genius? Here are, as I learn
from Mr. Osgood, some seventy-six thousand five hundred and forty-three
Young Folks, be the same more or less, who are reading this paper. How am
I to tell what are their seventy-six thousand five hundred and forty-three