A child should be taught to read almost as soon as it has learned to speak. I can remember my fourth birthday, but I cannot remember a time when I could not read. Without going into details as to the merits of different methods of teaching, I may say that a good many words may be taught before it is necessary to teach the letters--that reading should precede spelling--that CAT should be presented whole, as the symbol of Cat--and that the dissection of it into C.A.T. should come later. I believe that children taught in this way, and taught young, will not in after life be tortured by the difficulties of spelling. They will spell naturally, as they speak or walk. Of the value of the accomplishment of reading, as a let-off to parents and guardians, it would be impossible to speak too highly. It keeps the child busy, amused, still and quiet. The value to the child himself is not less. Nor is it only that the matter of his reading stores his mind with new material. To him also it is a good thing that he should sometimes be still and quiet, and at the same time interested and occupied. Of books for little children there are plenty--not fine literature, it is true--but harmless. As the child grows older he will want more books, and different books--and if you insist on personally conducting him on his grand tour through literature he will probably miss a good many places that he would like to go to. For a child from ten onwards it is no bad thing to give the run of a good general library. When he has exhausted the story books he will read the ballads, the histories and the travels, and may even nibble at science, poetry, or philosophy. I myself, at the age of thirteen, browsed contentedly in such a library--where Percy's anecdotes in thirty-nine volumes or so divided my attention with Hume, Locke and Berkeley. I even read Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and was none the worse for it. It is astonishing how little harm comes to children through books. Unless they have been taught by servants' chatter how to look for the "harm," they do not find it. I do not mean that absolutely every book is fit for a child's reading, but if you allow the reading of the Old Testament it is mere imbecility to insist that all the rest of your child's reading shall ignore the facts of life. You can always have a locked book-case if you choose: only see to it that the doors are not of glass, for the forbidden is always the desired.