on the shelves, and listened with
gleaming eyes to the account given by the librarian for the day of the
years of patient and uncomplaining struggles by which these
poverty-stricken mountaineers had secured this meager result. He struck
one hand into the other with a clap. "It's a chance in a million!" he
cried aloud.

When his momentous letter came back from Chicago, this was still the
recurrent note, that nowadays it is so hard for a poor millionaire to find
a deserving object for his gifts, that it is the rarest opportunity
possible when he really with his own eyes can make sure of placing his
money where it will carry on a work already begun in the right spirit. He
spoke in such glowing terms of Hillsboro's pathetic endeavors to keep
their poor little enterprise going, that Hillsboro, very unconscious
indeed of being pathetic, was bewildered. He said that owing to the
unusual conditions he would break the usual rules governing his
benefactions and ask no guarantee from the town. He begged, therefore, to
have the honor to announce that he had already dispatched an architect and
a contractor to Hillsboro, who would look the ground over, and put up a
thoroughly modern library building with no expense spared to make it
complete in equipment; that he had already placed to the credit of the
"Hillsboro Camden Public Library" a sufficient sum to maintain in
perpetuity a well-paid librarian, and to cover all expenses of fuel,
lights, purchase of books, cataloguing, etc.; and that the Library School
in Albany had already an order to select a perfectly well-balanced library
of thirty thousand books to begin with.

Reason recoils from any attempt to portray the excitement of Hillsboro
after this letter arrived. To say that it was as if a gold mine had been
discovered under the village green is the feeblest of metaphors. For an
entire week the town went to bed at night tired out with exclaiming, woke
in the morning sure it had dreamed it all, rushed with a common impulse to
the post-office where the letter was posted on the wall, and fell to
exclaiming again.

Then the architect and contractor arrived, and Hillsboro drew back into
its shell of somber taciturnity, and acted, the contractor told the
architect, as though they were in the habit of having libraries given them
three times a week regularly.

The architect replied that these mountaineers were like Indians. You
_couldn't_ throw a shock into them that would make them