When any one asks me what I am reading, I become much embarrassed.  I may be reading a catalogue of books at the time, or the book notices in some magazine, but such reading may not seem orthodox at all to the one who asks the question.  My reading may be too desultory or too personal to be paraded in public.  I don’t make it a practice to tell all the neighbors what I ate for breakfast.  I like to saunter along through the book just as I ride in a gondola when in Venice.  I’m not going anywhere, but get my enjoyment from merely being on the way.  I pay the gondolier and then let him have his own way with me.  So with the book.  I pay the money and then abandon myself to it.  If it can make me laugh, why, well and good, and I’ll laugh.  If it causes me to shed tears, why, let the tears flow.  They may do me good.  If I ever become conscious of the number of the page of the book I am reading, I know there is something the matter with that book or else with me.  If I ever become conscious of the page number in David Grayson’s “Adventures in Contentment,” or “The Friendly Road,” I shall certainly consult a physician.  I do become semiconscious at times that I am approaching the end of the feast, and feel regret that the book is not larger.

I have spasms and enjoy them.  Sometimes, I have a Dickens spasm, and read some of his books for the nth time.  I have frittered away much time in my life trying to discover whether a book is worth a second reading.  If it isn’t, it is hardly worth a first reading, I don’t get tired of my friend Brown, so why should I put Dickens off with a mere society call?  If I didn’t enjoy Brown I’d not visit him so frequently; but, liking him, I go again and again.  So with Dickens, Mark Twain, and Shakespeare.  The story goes that a second Uncle Remus was sitting on a stump in the depths of a forest sawing away on an old discordant violin.  A man, who chanced to come upon him, asked what he was doing.  With no interruption of his musical activities, he answered:  “Boss, I’se serenadin’ m’ soul.”  Book or violin, ’tis all the same.  Uncle Remus and I are serenading our souls and the exercise is good for us.

I was laid by with typhoid fever for a few weeks once, and the doctor came at eleven o’clock in the morning and at five o’clock in the afternoon.  If he happened to be a bit late I grew impatient, and my fever increased.  He discovered this fact, and was no more tardy.  He was reading “John Fiske” at the time, and Grant’s “Memoirs,” and at each visit reviewed for me what he had read since the previous visit.  He must have been glad when I no longer needed to take my history by proxy, for I kept him up to the mark, and bullied him into reciting twice a day.  I don’t know what drugs he gave me, but I do know that “Fiske” and “Grant” are good for typhoid, and heartily commend them to the general public.  I am rather glad now that I had typhoid fever.