He
has an odd, displaced look behind the great desk. He looks as if he had
gotten in by mistake and was trying to make the most of it. He has a
business-like, worldly-minded, foreign air about him--a kind of
off-hand, pert, familiar way with books. He does not know how to bend
over--like a librarian--and when one comes on him in an alcove, the way
one ought to come on a librarian, with a great folio on his knees, he
is--well, there are those who think, that have seen it, that he is
positively comic. I followed him around only the other day for fifteen
or twenty minutes, from one alcove to another, and watched him taking
down books. He does not even know how to take down a book. He takes all
the books down alike--the same pleasant, dapper, capable manner, the
same peek and clap for all of them. He always seems to have the same
indefatigable unconsciousness about him, going up and down his long
aisles, no more idea of what he is about or of what the books are about;
everything about him seems disconnected with a library. I find I cannot
get myself to notice him as a librarian or comrade, or book-mind. He
does not seem to have noticed himself in this capacity--exactly. So far
as I can get at his mind at all, he seems to have decided that his mind
(any librarian's mind) is a kind of pneumatic-tube, or carrier
system--apparently--for shoving immortals at people. Any higher or more
thorough use for a mind, such as being a kind of spirit of the books for
people, making a kind of spiritual connection with them down underneath,
does not seem to have occurred to him.

Time was when librarians really had something to do with books. They
looked it. One could almost tell a librarian on the street--tell him at
sight, if he had been one long enough. One could feel a library in a man
somehow. It struck in. Librarians were allowed to be persons. It was
expected of them. They have not always been what so many of them are
now--mere couplings, conveniences, connecting-rods, literary-beltings.
They were identified--wrought in with books. They could not be unmixed.
They ate books; and, like the little green caterpillars that eat green
grass, the colour showed through. A sort of general brown, faded colour,
a little undusted around the edges, was the proper colour for
librarians.

It is true that people did not expect librarians to look quite human--at
least on the outside, sometimes, and doubtless the whole matter was
carried too far. But