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NE day when it was raining cats and dogs, one of those dismal rains that wash away city snow, I turned in to a great public library to read a play that was begin given in Paris. The stage directions were clear, the dialog fascinating, and it was not until the curtain had fallen on the last page that I lifted my eyes, came back from France, and found that in the meantime the chairs near me had been taken by a dozen or more readers, who had come in-and gone out again. One of them, a boy, was on the Gulf of Guinea with "The Mutineers;" a young woman beside him had gone thru Ireland to fairyland with "The Crock of Gold;" a man was on the plains with Will James's "Smoky." The rain rattled the windows, but the readers heard nothing of it; they had parked their bodies in these comfortable armchairs and gone far away. Romance, adventure and fantasy take you a long way; that is one reason for reading books of fantasy, romance and adventure.

They take you away-and they bring you back refreshed and ready for anything, if you have chosen a good book. Almost any exciting story can carry an imaginative reader "out of himself," and too many such stories can leave you so dissatisfied with

From ADVENTURES IN READING, a book for boys and girls of high school age, by May Lamberton Becker, published by Frederick A. Stokes Company.

the pace at which you live, so restless for something, anything, to happen, that you will be quite unfit for such necessary occupations as geometry, wiping the dishes, or spending Sunday afternoon with your aunt. So, if you find that for hours after you come back from a book your everyday life seems like a slow-motion movie, before you decide to run away to sea, try rationing your romance for a while; let your thrillers be fewer and finer-for the finest thrillers not only take you away for a change of air, but bring you back as from a glorious vacation.

Sometimes I wonder why I read so much, getting life secondhand when I might just be living; why should I sit in the house and read poetry about daffodils, with real ones growing in the Park? So I dash around the corner into the Park and there are the daffodils-and I find them even lovelier to me from what Wordsworth said about them. Then I ask myself whether one reason I find life so entertaining may not be that thru books I have added so many other people's lives. to mine. I have, for instance, an India of my own; I do not know if it is the India on the map, but it is the one that "Kim" saw, and thru his eyes I can see it. Because his eyes were entranced with wonder, I see India wonderful and

entrancing. I can set sail for the country of Kubla Khan with "Messer Marco Polo," or the bird-forests of the Andes in "Green Mansions," or hunt Mexican treasure with "Snake Gold," and bring home beauty and wisdom that will take root and grow in my life in New York City, as a rose-bush or a Judas-tree, carried across a continent, will make itself, at home on a lawn in Long Islaånd.

You read books like these for something you do not have m your own everyday life; excitement, romance, adventure, something doing. In the books I am talking about here, you get all this, and something more. When you are plunged into such danger that you must act instantly or die, life comes to a focus, all its colors brighten, its outlines sharpen, and you live more intensely in that moment than in a hundred years of safety. If you take your desperate way with "Sard Harker" thru the tropic swamp, you too will see every flower as brilliant as at life's last moment. When you have struggled thru perilous adventure, if only by identifying yourself with some adventurer in a book, you may feel the glow that comes after struggle, the peace in which the spirit gathers strength for new effort. These are experiences that make life worth living, and even to touch them in the lives of others may be an enrichment. Remember this when you read "Nostromo," or "Moby Dick;" "Kidnapped," and "Four Feathers;" "The Shadow Line" and "Westward Ho!" "Beau Geste," or "The Man Who Did the Right Thing."

There are books that I would have no young person miss, and one of them is Malory's "Morte D'Arthur." You had King Arthur stories when you were little, and by the time you were in your teens you may have read "The Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights," which follows Malory closely and gives a boy or girl good vigorous reading. But when you are nearing the twenties Malory's own book, the little volume of "Everyman's Library" that slips so easily into the pocket, will go with you into the country, or stay with you thru a dull day at the office, ready to come out in a hall-bedroom after dinner and transform it into a castle. "Morte d'Arthur" was a book that Masefield carried with him when he ran away

to sea. Another little "Everyman's" of which no young person should be deprived is the "Chronicles" of Froissart; it is a mirror to chivalry. These chronicles and romances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries strip the story to action and spend no time in wondering about motives. When Launcelot gives "the grisliest groan ever man gave" and jumps out of the window, Malory does not stop to tell you that it was because his heart was broken. He knows you know that as well as he does. The essence of mediæval romance is that it deals with realities; vital things like love and war, solid things like stone castles and stout spears, strong things like shouts, combats and death. That is one reason why it lives, and why it will outlive so many romances of a weaker age.

If I knew a girl who was mooning over love-stories of the sort that Laura Jean Libbey used to produce, I would give her James Stephens' "Deirdre" and see if that did not take the taste out of the next mushy book. The story of Deirdre and the sons of Uisneac is very old; it is a heroic legend of Ireland told over and again in poems and in plays, but Stephens brings back the tragic young lovers as if it were yesterday that they met their fate. What a love-story is "Romeo and Juliet!" How passionate of devotion Gerard and Margaret through all the trials and wanderings of "The Cloister and the Hearth." If you are reading love-stories-and why not, I ask you?-read some tremendous ones, some with splendid sweeping emotions, lest we forget that life is capable of splendor.

Will you have more of my favorites among colorful, strange, imaginative stories? Dunsany's "Book of Wonder" and "Don Roderiguez;" Stephens' "Crock of Gold" and "Demi-Gods;" Masefield's "Lost Endeavor;" Walter de la Mare's "Memoirs of a Midget." I hope that the exquisite English in which these are written will make you dissatisfied with sloppy, commonplace writing, as beautiful music makes you intolerant of tawdry tunes. Children brought up on the poetry of Walter de la Mare, on his "Three Mulla Mulgars," on W. H. Hudson's "A Little Boy Lost," and the stories of Padraic Colum, have a head-start in the appreciation not only of imaginative literature but