g out, and the Librarian's record was carefully
searched by some of the more inquisitive investigators. The list proved
to be a long and varied one. It would imply a considerable knowledge of
modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and
physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a
fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling
these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the
Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De
Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and
modern works relating to Spiritualism. With these were the titles of
novels and now and then of books of poems; but it may be taken for
granted that his own shelves held the works he was most frequently in the
habit of reading or consulting. Not much was to be made out of this
beyond the fact of wide scholarship,--more or less deep it might be, but
at any rate implying no small mental activity; for he appeared to read
very rapidly, at any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new
ones very frequently. To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters.
But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary
purpose in all probability. Why should not he be writing a novel? Not a
novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to report the
talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with. Novelists
and lawyers understand the art of "cramming" better than any other
persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working up the
picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for some
story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and hints borrowed from
science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and
miscellaneous selection of books furnished him? That might be, or
possibly he was only reading for amusement. Who could say?

The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the managers
to purchase many books out of the common range of reading. The two
learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor. These two
worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions, which grows
out of the fact that one studies nature from below upwards, and the other
from above downwards. The rector maintained that physicians contracted a
squint which turns their eyes inwardly, while the muscles which roll
their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor reto