something to that effect. He went on at some length and
took the general ground before he was through, that absolutely
everything in modern libraries depended on the librarians. Librarians--I
should judge--in a modern library were what books were for. He said that
the more intelligent people were nowadays the more they enjoyed
librarians--knew how to use them--doted on them, etc., _ad infinitum_.

"The kind of people one sees at operas," I interrupted, "listening with
librettos, the kind of people who puff up mountains to see views and
extract geography from them, the people one meets in the fields,
nowadays, flower in one hand, botany in the other, the kind of people
who have to have charts to enjoy stars with--these are the people who
want librarians between them and their books. The more librarians they
can get standing in a row between them and a masterpiece the more they
feel they are appreciating it, the more card catalogues, gazetteers,
dictionaries, derricks, and other machinery they can have pulling and
hauling above their heads in a library the more literary they feel in
it. They feel culture--somehow--stirring around them. They are not
exactly sure what culture is, but they feel that a great deal of
it--whatever it is--is being poured over into them."

But I must begin to bring these wanderings about libraries to a close.
It can do no harm to remark, perhaps, that I am not maintaining--do not
wish to maintain (I could not if I dared) that the modern librarian with
all his faults is not useful at times. As a sort of pianola or aeolian
attachment for a library, as a mechanical contrivance for making a
comparatively ignorant man draw perfectly enormous harmonies out of it
(which he does not care anything about), a modern librarian helps. All
that I am maintaining is, that I am not this comparatively ignorant man.
I am another one. I am merely saying that the pianola way of dealing
with ignorance, in my own case, up to the present at least, does not
grow on me.

V

O

I suppose that the Boston Public Library would say--if it said
anything--that I had a mere Old Athenaeum kind of a mind. I am obliged to
confess that I dote on the Old Athenaeum. It protects one's optimism. One
is made to feel there--let right down in the midst of civilisation,
within a stone's throw of the State House--that it is barely possible to
keep civilisation off. One feels it rolling itself along, heaping itself
up out on Tremont St