from Tiffany's.

When the young-lady librarian arrived from Albany and approved
enthusiastically of the stack-room and cataloguing, the architect's cup of
satisfaction fairly ran over; and when he went away, leaving her installed
in her handsome oak-finished office, he could hardly refrain from
embracing her, so exactly the right touch did she add to the whole thing
with her fresh white shirt-waist and pretty, business-like airs. There had
been no ceremony of opening, because Mr. Camden was so absorbed in an
exciting wheat deal that he could not think of coming East, and indeed the
whole transaction had been almost blotted from his mind by a month's
flurried, unsteady market. So one day in November the pretty librarian
walked into her office, and the Hillsboro Camden Public Library was open.

She was a very pretty librarian indeed, and she wore her tailor suits with
an air which made the village girls look uneasily into their mirrors and
made the village boys look after her as she passed. She was moreover as
permeated with the missionary fervor instilled into her at the Library
School as she was pretty, and she began at once to practice all the latest
devices for automatically turning a benighted community into the latest
thing in culture. When Mrs. Bradlaugh, wife of the deacon, and president
of the Ladies' Aid Society, was confined to the house with a cold, she
sent over to the library, as was her wont in such cases, for some
entertaining story to while away her tedious convalescence. Miss Martin
sent back one of Henry James's novels, and was surprised that Mrs.
Bradlaugh made no second attempt to use the library. When the little girls
in school asked for the Elsie books, she answered with a glow of pride
that the library did not possess one of those silly stories, and offered
as substitute, "Greek Myths for Children."

Squire Pritchett came, in a great hurry, one morning, and asked for his
favorite condensed handbook of geology, in order to identify a stone. He
was told that it was entirely out of date and very incomplete, and the
library did not own it, and he was referred to the drawer in the card
catalogue relating to geology. For a time his stubbed old fingers rambled
among the cards, with an ever-rising flood of baffled exasperation. How
could he tell by looking at a strange name on a little piece of paper
whether the book it represented would tell him about a stone out of his
gravel-pit! Finally he appealed t