nd
violating their spirit. The fact that the machinery is filled with a
mirage of pleasant faces does not help. Pleasant faces make machinery
worse--if they are a part of it. They make one expect something better."

The P. G. S. of M. wished me to understand at this point that I was not
made right, that I was incapable, helpless in a library, that I did not
seem to know what to do unless I could have a simple, natural, or
country relation to books.

"It doesn't follow," he said, "because you are bashful in a library,
cannot get your mind to work there, with other people around, that the
other people oughtn't to be around. There are a great many ways of using
a library, and the more people there are crowded in with the books
there, other things being equal, the better. It's what a library is
for," he said, and a great deal more to the same effect.

I listened a while and told him that I supposed he was right. I supposed
I had naturally a kind of wild mind. I allowed that the more a library
in a general way took after a piece of woods, the more I enjoyed it. I
did not attempt to deny that a library was made for the people, but I
did think there ought to be places in libraries--all libraries--where
wild ones, like me, could go. There ought to be in every library some
uncultivated, uncatalogued, unlibrarianed tract where a man with a
skittish or country mind will have a chance, where a man who likes to be
alone with books--with books just as books--will be permitted to browze,
unnoticed, bars all down, and frisk with his mind and roll himself,
without turning over all of a sudden only to find a librarian's
assistant standing there wondering at him, looking down to the bottom of
his soul.

I am not in the least denying that librarians are well enough,--that is,
might be well enough,--but as things are going to-day, they all seem to
contribute, somehow, toward making a library a conscious and stilted
place. They hold one up to the surface of things, with books. They make
impossible to a man those freedoms of the spirit--those best times of
all in a library, when one feels free to find one's mood, when one gets
hold of one's divining-rod, opens down into a book, discovers a new,
unconscious, subterranean self there.

The P. G. S. of M. broke in at this point and said this was all
subjective folderol on my part--that I had better drop it--a kind of
habit I had gotten into lately, of splitting the hairs of my
emotions--or