Jonathan methodically tucked his bookmark into "The Virginians," and, closing the fat green volume, began to knock the ashes out of his pipe against the bricked sides of the fireplace.

"\'The Virginians\' is a very comfortable sort of book," he remarked.

"Is it?" I said. "I wonder why."

He ruminated. "Well, chiefly, I suppose, because it\'s so good and long. You get to know all the people, you get used to their ways, and when they turn up again, after a lot of chapters, you don\'t have to find out who they are—you just feel comfortably acquainted."

I sighed. I had just finished a magazine story—condensed, vivid, crushing a whole life-tragedy into seven pages and a half. In that space I had been made acquainted with sixteen different characters, seven principal[Pg 215] ones and the rest subordinate, but all clearly drawn. I had found it interesting, stimulating; as a tour de force it was noteworthy even among the crowd of short-stories—all condensed, all vivid, all interesting—that had appeared that month. But—comfortable? No. And I felt envious of Jonathan. He had been reading "The Virginians" all winter. His bookmark was at page 597, and there were 803 pages in all, so he had a great deal of comfort left.

Perhaps comfort is not quite all that one should expect from one\'s reading. Certainly it is the last thing one gets from the perusal of our current literature, and any one who reads nothing else is missing something which, whether he realizes it or not, he ought for his soul\'s sake to have—something which Jonathan roughly indicated when he called it "comfort." The ordinary reader devours short-stories by the dozen, by the score—short short-stories, long short-stories, even short-stories laboriously expanded to a volume, but still short-stories. He glances, less frequently, at verses, chiefly quatrains, at columns of jokes, at popularized bits of history[Pg 216] and science, at bits of anecdotal biography, and nowhere in all this medley does he come in contact with what is large and leisurely. Current literature is like a garden I once saw. Its proud owner led me through a maze of smooth-trodden paths, and pointed out a vast number of horticultural achievements. There were sixty-seven varieties of dahlias, there were more than a hundred kinds of roses, there were untold wonders which at last my weary brain refused to record. Finally I escaped, exhausted, and sought refuge on a hillside I knew, from which I could look across the billowing green of a great rye-field, and there, given up to the beauty of its manifold simplicity, I invited my soul.

It is even so with our reading. When I go into one of our public reading-rooms, and survey the serried ranks of magazines and the long shelves full of "Recent fiction, not to be taken out for more than five days,"—nay, even when I look at the library tables of some of my friends,—my brain grows sick and I long for my rye-field.

Happily, there always is a rye-field at hand to be had for the seeking. Jonathan finds refuge[Pg 217] from business and the newspapers in his pipe and "The Virginians." I have no pipe, but I sit under the curling rings of Jonathan\'s, and I, too, have my comfortable books, my literary rye-fields. Last summer it was Malory\'s "Morte d\'Arthur," whose book I found indeed a comfortable one—most comfortable. I read much besides, many short stories of surpassing cleverness and some of real excellence, but as I look back upon my summer\'s literary experience, all else gives place to the long pageant of Malory\'s story, gorgeous or tender or gay, seen like a fair vision against the dim background of an old New England apple orchard. Surely, though the literature of our library tables may sometimes weary me, it shall never enslave me.

But they must be read, these "comfortable" books, in the proper fashion, not hastily, nor cursorily, nor with any desire to "get on" in them. They must lie at our hand to be taken up............