step to its relief. To confess it, as has been said before, is the second.
In a minute I will be ready to say what I can to this happy half; but one
minute first for the less happy half, who know they want to read something
because it is so nice to read a pleasant book, but who do not know what
that something is. They come to us, as their ancestors came to a relative
of mine who was librarian of a town library sixty years ago: "Please, sir,
mother wants a sermon book, and another book."

To these undecided ones I simply say, now has the time come for decision.
Your school studies have undoubtedly opened up so many subjects to you
that you very naturally find it hard to select between them. Shall you
keep up your drawing, or your music, or your history, or your botany, or
your chemistry? Very well in the schools, my dear Alice, to have started
you in these things, but now you are coming to be a woman, it is for you
to decide which shall go forward; it is not for Miss Winstanley, far less
for me, who never saw your face, and know nothing of what you can or
cannot do.

Now you can decide in this way. Tell me, or tell yourself, what is the
passage in your reading or in your life for the last week which rests on
your memory. Let us see if we thoroughly understand that passage. If we do
not, we will see if we cannot learn to. That will give us a "course of
reading" for the next twelve months, or if we choose, for the rest of our
lives. There is no end, you will see, to a true course of reading; and, on
the other hand, you may about as well begin at one place as another.
Remember that you have infinite lives before you, so you need not hurry in
the details for fear the work should be never done.

Now I must show you how to go to work, by supposing you have been
interested in some particular passage. Let us take a passage from