o the librarian, who proclaimed on all
occasions her eagerness to help inquirers, and she referred him to a
handsome great Encyclopedia of Geology in forty-seven volumes. He wandered
around hopelessly in this for about an hour, and in the end retreated
unenlightened. Miss Martin tried to help him in his search, but, half
amused by his rustic ignorance, she asked him finally, with an air of
gentle patience, "how, if he didn't know _any_ of the scientific names,
he expected to be able to look up a subject in an alphabetically arranged
book?" Squire Pritchett never entered the library again. His son Elnathan
might be caught by her airs and graces, he said rudely enough in the
post-office, but he was "too old to be talked down to by a chit who didn't
know granite from marble."

When the schoolboys asked for "Nick Carter" she gave them those classics,
"The Rollo Books"; and to the French-Canadians she gave, reasonably
enough, the acknowledged masters of their language, Voltaire, Balzac, and
Flaubert, till the horrified priest forbade from the pulpit any of his
simple-minded flock to enter "that temple of sin, the public library." She
had little classes in art-criticism for the young ladies in town,
explaining to them with sweet lucidity why the Botticellis and Rembrandts
and Duerers were better than the chromos which still hung on the walls of
the old library, now cold and deserted except for church suppers and
sociables. These were never held in the new reading-room, the oriental
rugs being much too fine to have doughnut crumbs and coffee spilled on
them. After a time, however, the young ladies told her that they found
themselves too busy getting the missionary barrels ready to continue
absorbing information about Botticelli's rhythm and Duerer's line.

Miss Martin was not only pretty and competent, but she was firm of
purpose, as was shown by her encounter with Elzaphan Hall, who had
domineered over two generations of amateur librarians. The old man had
received strict orders to preserve silence in the reading-room when the
librarian could not be there, and yet one day she returned from the
stack-room to find the place in a most shocking state of confusion.
Everybody was laughing, Elzaphan himself most of all, and they did not
stop when she brought her severe young face among them. Elzaphan
explained, waving his hand at a dark Rembrandt looking gloomily down upon
them, that Elnathan Pritchett had said that if _he_ had such