NOVELS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 26, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 13.

A YOUTH brought up on novels is pretty sure to have an overstimulated imagination and no common sense. To walk up the steps of marble palaces and to come into contact with heroes and heroines of phenomenal virtues and vices is apt to unfit a boy for splitting wood for the kitchen stove or doing chores about the house. After spending the evening in consuming the dime novel, and breathlessly following the fortunes of women with saintly faces and men with overgrown moustaches, everyday life seems a bit insipid, and it becomes hard to crawl out of bed at 5 o’clock in the morning, with the mercury at zero, and go to the office to sweep the floor for $2.50 a week.

Good, solid reading, which makes them feel that they are in their glory when they are burnishing the brass on the shop door, because it is the first step in the upward climb, is what they ought to have.—Selected.