And indeed, as up to this time they had never hummed at all, it is not surprising that Hillsboro caught its breath as the work went forward like Aladdin’s palace.  The corner-stone was laid on the third of July and on the first of October the building stood complete.  By the first of November the books had come already catalogued by the Library School and arranged in boxes so that they could be put at once upon the shelves; and the last details of the interior decoration were complete.  The architect was in the most naive ecstasy of admiration for his own taste.  The outside was deliciously unhackneyed in design, the only reproduction of a Norwegian Stave-Kirke in America, he reported to Mr. Camden; and while that made the interior a little dark, the quaint wooden building was exquisitely in harmony with the landscape.  As for the interior it was a dream!  The reading-room was like the most beautiful drawing-room, an education in itself, done in dark oak, with oriental rugs, mission furniture, and reproductions of old masters on the walls.  Lace sash-curtains hung at the windows, covered by rich draperies in oriental design, which subdued the light to a delightful soberness.  The lamps came from Tiffany’s.

When the young-lady librarian arrived from Albany and approved enthusiastically of the stack-room and cataloguing, the architect’s cup of satisfaction fairly ran over; and when he went away, leaving her installed in her handsome oak-finished office, he could hardly refrain from embracing her, so exactly the right touch did she add to the whole thing with her fresh white shirt-waist and pretty, business-like airs.  There had been no ceremony of opening, because Mr. Camden was so absorbed in an exciting wheat deal that he could not think of coming East, and indeed the whole transaction had been almost blotted from his mind by a month’s flurried, unsteady market.  So one day in November the pretty librarian walked into her office, and the Hillsboro Camden Public Library was open.

She was a very pretty librarian indeed, and she wore her tailor suits with an air which made the village girls look uneasily into their mirrors and made the village boys look after her as she passed.  She was moreover as permeated with the missionary fervor instilled into her at the Library School as she was pretty, and she began at once to practice all the latest devices for automatically turning a benighted community into the latest thing in culture.  When Mrs. Bradlaugh, wife of the deacon, and president of the Ladies’ Aid Society, was confined to the house with a cold, she sent over to the library, as was her wont in such cases, for some entertaining story to while away her tedious convalescence.  Miss Martin sent back one of Henry James’s novels, and was surprised that Mrs. Bradlaugh made no second attempt to use the library.  When the little girls in school asked for the Elsie books, she answered with a glow of pride that the library did not possess one of those silly stories, and offered as substitute, “Greek Myths for Children.”