a dirty face
as that he'd _wash_ it, if he had to go as far as from here to the Eagle
Rock Spring to get the water! This seemed the dullest of bucolic wit to
Miss Martin, and she chilled Elnathan to the marrow by her sad gaze of
disappointment in him. Jennie Foster was very jealous of Miss Martin (as
were all the girls in town), and she rejoiced openly in Elnathan's
witticism, continuing to laugh at intervals after the rest of the room had
cowered into silence under the librarian's eye.

Miss Martin took the old janitor aside and told him sternly that if such
a thing happened again she would dismiss him; and when the old man,
crazily trying to show his spirit, allowed a spelling-match to go on, full
blast, right in library hours, she did dismiss him, drawing on the endless
funds at her disposal to import a young Irishman from Albany, who was soon
playing havoc with the pretty French-Canadian girls. Elzaphan Hall,
stunned by the blow, fell into bad company and began to drink heavily,
paying for his liquor by exceedingly comic and disrespectful imitations of
Miss Martin's talks on art.

It was now about the middle of the winter, and the knoll which in June had
been the center of gratefully cool breezes was raked by piercing north
winds which penetrated the picturesquely unplastered, wood-finished walls
as though they had been paper. The steam-heating plant did not work very
well, and the new janitor, seeing fewer and fewer people come to the
reading-room, spent less and less time in struggling with the boilers, or
in keeping the long path up the hill shoveled clear of snow. Miss Martin,
positively frightened by the ferocity with which winter flings itself upon
the high narrow valley, was helpless before the problem of the new
conditions, and could think of nothing to do except to buy more fuel and
yet more, and to beseech the elusive Celt, city-trained in plausible
excuses for not doing his duty, to burn more wood. Once she remarked
plaintively to Elnathan Pritchett, as she sat beside him at a church
supper (for she made a great point of "mingling with the people"), that it
seemed to her there must be something the _matter_ with the wood in
Hillsboro.

Everybody within earshot laughed, and the saying was repeated the next day
with shameless mirth as the best joke of the season. For the wood for the
library had had a history distinctly discreditable and as distinctly
ludicrous, at which Hillsboro people laughed with a c