committee who made it?"

"Oh, I _made_ it _myself_."

This was a "facer"; the librarian seemed to have brought up against a
stone wall, but she waited, knowing that a situation, unlike a knot, will
sometimes untie itself.

The seeker after knowledge also waited for a time. Then she broke out
animatedly:

"Why, I just wanted American travels, don't you know? Funny little stories
and things about the sort of Americans that go abroad with a bird-cage!"

Just what books were given to her I do not know; but in due time her
interesting paper before the Olla Podrida Club was properly noticed in the
local papers.

In another case a perplexed club-woman came to a library for aid in making
a programme of reading. "Have you some ideas about the subject you want to
take up?" asked the reference assistant.

"Well, we had thought of England, or perhaps Scotland; and some of us
would like the Elizabethan Period."

The assistant, after some faithful work, produced a list of books and
articles on each of these somewhat comprehensive subjects and sent them to
the reader for selection. "Which did you finally take?" she asked when the
inquirer next visited the library.

"Oh, they were so good, we decided to use all of them this year!"

The writer is no pessimist. These stories which are as true, word for
word, as any tales not taken down by a stenographer (and far more so than
some that are) seemed to throw the persons who told them into a sort of
dumb despair, but I hastened to reassure them. I pointed out that the
inquirers after knowledge had, beyond all doubt, obtained some modicum of
what they wanted. If the lady in the first tale, for instance, had
mistakenly supposed that the Medici were a new kind of dance or something
to eat, she surely has been disabused. And her cyclopedia article was
probably as well written as most of its kind, so that a literal transcript
of it could have done no harm either to the copyist or to her clubmates.
And the paper on "American Travels," and the combined lists on England,
Scotland and the Elizabethan Period; did not those who laboured on them,
or with them, acquire information in the process? Most assuredly!

Still, I must confess that, in advancing these arguments, I feel somewhat
like an _advocatus diaboli_. It is all very well to treat the puzzled
clubwoman as a joke. When a man slips on a banana-peel and goes down, we
may laugh at his plight; but suppose the whole crowd of passers-by