d spent forty-four in
Middletown, and forty as librarian of the college.

He had come down, a shy, lanky freshman of sixteen, from a little village
in the Green Mountains, and had found the only consolation for his
homesick soul in the reading-room of the library. During his sophomore and
junior years, there had sprung up in the bookish lad, shrinking from the
rough fun of his fellows, the first shoots of that passionate attachment
to the library which was later to bind him so irrevocably to the old
building. In those early days there was no regular librarian, the
professors taking turn and turn about in keeping the reading-room open for
a few hours, three or four days a week. In his senior year, "J.M." (even
at that time his real name was sunk in the initials, the significance of
which he jealously concealed) petitioned the faculty to be allowed to take
charge of the reading-room. They gave a shrug of surprise at his
eccentricity, investigated briefly his eminently sober-minded college
career, and heaved a sigh of relief as they granted his extraordinary
request.

On the evening of Commencement day, J.M. went to the president and made
the following statement: He said that his father and his mother had both
died during his senior year, leaving him entirely alone in the world, with
a small inheritance yielding about fifty dollars a month. He had no
leaning to any profession, he shrank with all his being from the savage
struggles of the business world, and he could not bear to return to
Woodville, to find himself lonely and bereaved in the spot where he had
had such a cloudlessly happy childhood. In short, Middletown was the only
place he knew and liked, except Woodville, which he loved too poignantly
to live there with the soul gone out of things; and the library was the
only home he now had. If the president could get the trustees, at their
next meeting, to allow him the use of the three rooms in the library
tower, and if they would vote him a small nominal salary, say thirty
dollars a month, enough to make him a regular member of the college corps,
he would like nothing better than to settle down and be the librarian of
his _alma mater_ for the rest of his life.

The president of that date was, like all the other presidents of
Middletown College, a florid, hearty old gentleman with more red blood
than he knew what to do with, in spite of his seventy years. He was vastly
amused at the inexperienced young fellow's simp