g and human though--looking out from
its Dust Heap. "It seems to me," I thought, as I stood in the
doorway,--saw him edging around an alcove in The Syriac
Department,--"that if one must have a great dreary heaped-up pile of
books in a town--anyway--the spectacle of a man like this, flitting
around in it, doting on them, is what one ought to have to go with it."
He always seemed to me a kind of responsive every-way-at-once little
man, book-alive all through. One never missed it with him. He had the
literary nerves of ten dead nations tingling in him.

The next time I was in town they said he had resigned. They said he
lived in the little grey house around the corner from the great new
glaring stone library. No one ever saw him except in one of his long,
hesitating walks, or sometimes, perhaps, by the little study window,
pouring himself over into a book there. It was there that I saw him
myself that last morning--older and closer to the light turning
leaves--the same still, swift eagerness about him.

I stepped into the library next door and saw the new librarian--an
efficient person. He seemed to know what time it was while we stood and
chatted together. That is the main impression one had of him--that he
would always know what time it was. Put him anywhere. One felt it.

II

cf.

Our new librarian troubles me a good deal. I have not quite made out
why. Perhaps it is because he has a kind of chipper air with the books.
I am always coming across him in the shelves, but I do not seem to get
used to him. Of course I pull myself together, bow and say things, make
it a point to assume he is literary, go through the form of not letting
him know what I think as well as may be, but we do not get on.

And yet all the time down underneath I know perfectly well that there is
no real reason why I should find fault with him. The only thing that
seems to be the matter with him is that he keeps right on, every time I
see him, making me try to.

I have had occasion to notice that, as a general rule, when I find
myself finding fault with a man in this fashion--this vague, eager
fashion--the gist of it is that I merely want him to be some one else.
But in this case--well, he is some one else. He is almost anybody else.
He might be a head salesman in a department store, or a hotel clerk, or
a train dispatcher, or a broker, or a treasurer of something. There are
thousands of things he might be--ought to be--except our librarian.