Squire Pritchett came, in a great hurry, one morning, and asked for his favorite condensed handbook of geology, in order to identify a stone.  He was told that it was entirely out of date and very incomplete, and the library did not own it, and he was referred to the drawer in the card catalogue relating to geology.  For a time his stubbed old fingers rambled among the cards, with an ever-rising flood of baffled exasperation.  How could he tell by looking at a strange name on a little piece of paper whether the book it represented would tell him about a stone out of his gravel-pit!  Finally he appealed to the librarian, who proclaimed on all occasions her eagerness to help inquirers, and she referred him to a handsome great Encyclopedia of Geology in forty-seven volumes.  He wandered around hopelessly in this for about an hour, and in the end retreated unenlightened.  Miss Martin tried to help him in his search, but, half amused by his rustic ignorance, she asked him finally, with an air of gentle patience, “how, if he didn’t know any of the scientific names, he expected to be able to look up a subject in an alphabetically arranged book?” Squire Pritchett never entered the library again.  His son Elnathan might be caught by her airs and graces, he said rudely enough in the post-office, but he was “too old to be talked down to by a chit who didn’t know granite from marble.”

When the schoolboys asked for “Nick Carter” she gave them those classics, “The Rollo Books”; and to the French-Canadians she gave, reasonably enough, the acknowledged masters of their language, Voltaire, Balzac, and Flaubert, till the horrified priest forbade from the pulpit any of his simple-minded flock to enter “that temple of sin, the public library.”  She had little classes in art-criticism for the young ladies in town, explaining to them with sweet lucidity why the Botticellis and Rembrandts and Duerers were better than the chromos which still hung on the walls of the old library, now cold and deserted except for church suppers and sociables.  These were never held in the new reading-room, the oriental rugs being much too fine to have doughnut crumbs and coffee spilled on them.  After a time, however, the young ladies told her that they found themselves too busy getting the missionary barrels ready to continue absorbing information about Botticelli’s rhythm and Duerer’s line.

Miss Martin was not only pretty and competent, but she was firm of purpose, as was shown by her encounter with Elzaphan Hall, who had domineered over two generations of amateur librarians.  The old man had received strict orders to preserve silence in the reading-room when the librarian could not be there, and yet one day she returned from the stack-room to find the place in a most shocking state of confusion.  Everybody was laughing, Elzaphan himself most of all, and they did not stop when she brought her severe young face among them.  Elzaphan explained, waving his hand