first to the library to see an exhibition of pictures of old New York.  A recent importation says:  “When I came from Paris I found all my cousins speaking English; ‘well,’ they said, ’go to the library and take books’”—­a process that doubtless did its share toward making an American of the new arrival.  In another case, the Americanizing process has not yet reached the stage where the user’s English is altogether intelligible.  He says:  “Because I like to read the book.  I ask the bakery lady to my reference and I sing my neam” [sign my name?].

Here are some examples of recently acquired elegance in diction that are almost baboo-like in their hopelessness:  “Because it interest about the countries that are far away.  It gives knowledge to many of the people in this country.”  “So as to obtain knowledge from them and by reading books find out how the great men were in their former days and all about them and the world and its people.”  It will be seen that the last two writers were among those who misunderstood our questions and told why they read books rather than how they were first led to the use of a library.

These reports are far from possessing merely a passing interest for the curious.  For the public librarian, whose wish it is to reach as large a proportion of the public as possible, they are full of valuable hints.  They emphasize, for instance, the urgent necessity of winning the good will of the public, and they forcibly remind us that this is of more value in gaining a foothold for the library than columns of notices in the papers or thousands of circulars or cards distributed in the neighborhood.  It is even more potent than a beautiful building.  Attractive as this is, its value as an influence to secure new readers is vastly less than a reputation for hospitality and helpfulness.

In looking over the figures one rather disquieting thought cannot be kept down.  If the good will of the public is so potent in increasing the use of the library, the ill will of the same public must be equally potent in the opposite direction.  Some of those who are satisfied with us and our work are here put on record.  How about the dissatisfied?  A record of these might be even more interesting, for it would point out weaknesses to be strengthened and errors to be avoided—­but that, as Kipling says, “is another story.”

THE PASSING OF THE POSSESSIVE:  A STUDY OF BOOK-TITLES

If there is one particular advantage possessed by the Teutonic over the Romance languages in idiomatic clearness and precision it is that conferred by their ownership of a possessive case, almost the sole remaining monument to the fact that our ancestors spoke an inflected tongue.  That we should still be able to speak of “the baker’s wife’s dog” instead of “the dog of the wife of the baker” certainly should be regarded by English-speaking people as a precious birthright.  Yet, there are increasing evidences of a tendency to discard this only remaining case-ending and to replace its powerful backbone with the comparatively limp and cartilaginous preposition.  This tendency has not yet appeared so much in our spoken as in our written language, and even here only in the most formal parts of it.  It is especially noticeable in the diction of the purely formal title and heading.