out that they
are not dead. The Altar smoulders.

In pointing out how imagination and personality can be wrought into one
single branch of a man's education--his relation to books--principles
may have been suggested which can be concretely applied by all of us,
each in our own department, to the education of the whole man.

The Seventh Interference: Libraries. Wanted: An Old-Fashioned Librarian

I

viz.

I never shall quite forget the time when the rumour was started in our
town that old Mr. M----, our librarian--a gentle, furtive, silent man--a
man who (with the single exception of a long white beard) was all
screwed up and bent around with learning, who was always slipping
invisibly in and out of his high shelves, and who looked as if his whole
life had been nothing but a kind of long, perpetual salaam to books--had
been caught dancing one day with his wife.

"Which only goes to show," broke in The M. P., "what a man of fixed
literary habits--mere book-habits--if he keeps on, is reduced to."

But as I was about to remark, for a good many weeks afterward--after the
rumour was started--one kept seeing people (I was one of them) as they
came into the library, looking shyly at Mr. M----, as if they were
looking at him all over again. They looked at him as if they had really
never quite noticed him before. He sat at his desk, quiet and busy, and
bent over, with his fine-pointed pen and his labels, as usual, and his
big leather-bound catalogue of the universe.

A few of us had had reason to suspect--at least we had had hopes--that
the pedantry in Mr. M---- was somewhat superimposed, that he had
possibilities, human and otherwise, but none of us, it must be
confessed, had been able to surmise quite accurately just where they
would break out. We were filled with a gentle spreading joy with the
very thought of it, a sense of having acquired a secret possession in a
librarian. The community at large, however, as it walked into its
library, looked at its Acre of Books, and then looked at its librarian;
felt cheated. It was shocked. The community had always been proud of its
books, proud of its Book Worm. It had always paid a big salary to it.
And the Worm had turned.

I have only been back to the old town twice since the day I left it, as
a boy--about this time. The first time I went he was there. I came
across him in his big, splendid new library, his face like some live,
but wrinkled old parchment, twinklin