CHAPTER XXXIII.
LITERARY ABSTINENCE.
It is as much an art not to read as to read.

With what pains, and thumps, and whacks at school we first learned the way to put words together! We did not mind so much being whipped by the schoolmaster for not knowing how to read our lesson, but to have to go out ourselves and cut the hickory switch with which the chastisement was to be inflicted seemed to us then, as it does now, a great injustice.
Notwithstanding all our hard work in learning to read we find it quite as hard now to learn how not to read.

There are innumerable books and newspapers from which one had better abstain.
There are but very few newspapers which it is safe to read all through, though we know of one that it is best to peruse from beginning to end, but modesty forbids us stating which one that is.

In this day readers need as never before to carry a sieve.
It requires some heroism to say you have not read such and such a book.
Your friend gives you a stare which implies your literary inferiority.

Do not, in order to answer the question affirmatively, wade through indiscriminate slush.
We have to say that three-fourths of the novels of the day are a mental depletion to those who read them.