braries here and there, like the one at Ellerby Mill,
and loaded their shelves with fine old works. In the cities it expanded
into associations, and large, lofty chambers were filled to the ceiling
with costly tomes, which now look so dark, and rich, and ancient to
Northern visitors, accustomed to the lightly bound, cheap new books
constantly succeeding each other on the shelves of Northern libraries.
These Southern collections were not for the multitude; there was no
multitude. Where plantations met, where there was a neighborhood, there
grew up the little country library. No one was in a hurry; the rules
were lenient; the library was but a part of the easy, luxurious way of
living which belonged to the planters. The books were generally
imported, an English rather than a New York imprint being preferred;
and, without doubt, they selected the classics of the world. But they
stopped, generally, at the end of the last century, often at a date
still earlier; they forgot that there may be new classics.

The library at Ellerby Mill was built by low-country planters who came
up to the mountains during the warm months, having rambling old
country-houses there. They had their little summer church, St. Mark's in
the Wilderness, and they looked down upon the mountain-people, who,
plain folk themselves, revered the old names borne by their summer
visitors, names known in their State annals since the earliest times.
The mountain-people had been so long accustomed to see their judges,
governors, representatives, and senators chosen from certain families,
that these offices seemed to them to belong by inheritance to those
families; certainly the farmers never disputed the right. For the
mountain-people were farmers, not planters; their slaves were few. They
were a class by themselves, a connecting link between the North and the
South. The old names, then, placed Ellerby Library where it stood full
thirty years before Honor was born. They did not care for the village,
but erected the small building at a point about equidistant from their
country-houses, and near the mill for safety, that boys or idle slaves,
drawn by the charm which any building, even an empty shed, possesses in
a thinly settled country, might not congregate there on Sundays and
holidays, or camp there at night. But the library had been closed now
for thirteen years; the trustees were all dead, the books moldy, the
very door-key was lost. The low-country planters no l