Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/148

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undergraduates do once in a while read such a book; I mean that the student who has been rightly trained, who has been made to like books as every student should, will find pleasure and recreation and delight in spending an evening with such old stand-bys as Dickens, and Thackeray, and Stevenson, and George Eliot. There is more romance and real life in an hour or two with one of these authors than in a whole cycle of the ordinary cheap photo-play and vaudeville. I was surprised though pleased not long ago to have a junior engineer tell me that he always kept an interesting book at hand to read when he was tired or had a little leisure. He has covered a range of literature from Arnold Bennett to Robert Burns and has developed a habit which will bring him pleasure and profit as long as he lives. Our college daily mentioned not long ago the case of a man who when wishing to withdraw regularly from college was directed to take his withdrawal permit to the library to have the official in charge of the loan desk certify that all books which he had drawn out had been properly returned. The student was confused for a moment, and then recovering himself said with a gleam of something akin to intelligence, "Oh, yes, that's the building across from the Arcade, isn't it?" He knew the