To conclude my suggestions about reading I would urge this.  Like all the best things in life, the recreation of reading needs a little planning.  When we have a holiday in prospect we make plans beforehand so that when the time comes we may know exactly where we want to go, what we want to do, how the holiday is to be spent, and have all our preparations ready.  If we do not do that the holiday finds us unprepared and the greater part of it is wasted.  So with our spare time, our casual leisure.  Do not let it find us unprepared.  It is a good plan to make a list of books which either from our own thought, our own experience, or the recommendation of friends, we feel a desire to read.  We should have one or two of these books always at hand, and have them in mind, too, as something which we are longing to read at the first opportunity.  I think some people lose the habit and pleasure of reading because they do not take this trouble and make no plan, and when the spare evening or the long railway journey or the wet day comes it finds them without any book in anticipation, and they pick up a newspaper or a magazine, not because they specially want to read it, but because they have nothing present to their minds or at hand which they really care for.  The habit of planning ahead is essential to real cultivation of the pleasure of reading, just as essential as planning is for sport or travel or games or any of the other pleasures of life.  I know friends who are fond of sport.  They choose a long time beforehand the river they will fish or the sort of shooting they will pursue.  Another friend likes travel and plans months in advance where he will go and what he will see.  Without this fore-thought and planning they would not get their pleasure, and so it is with reading.  If we once acquire the habit of planning, we find out increasingly what it is that we like, and our difficulty at any spare moment is not to find some book that we are longing to read, but to choose which book of those to which we are looking forward in anticipation we shall take first.

I have spoken about planning for a holiday, and I will give an instance of how thoroughly President Roosevelt planned for a holiday.  Several years ago when I was at the Foreign Office in London, I got a letter from Mr. Bryce, who was then British Ambassador at Washington, saying that President Roosevelt intended to travel as soon as he was out of office.  He was going to travel in Africa, to visit Europe, and to come to England, and he was planning his holiday so minutely as to time his visit to England for the spring, when the birds would be in full song and he could hear them.  For this purpose he wanted it to be arranged that somebody who knew the songs of the English birds should go for a walk with him in the country, and as the songs were heard tell him what the birds were.  That is a pretty good instance of thorough planning in advance for a holiday.  It seemed to me very attractive that the executive