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 began to pitch and slide and tumble!  Should we not think that some horrible epidemic had laid its hand on us?  The ladies with their Medici and their Travels are not isolated instances.  Ask the librarians; they know, but in countless instances they do not tell, for fear of casting ridicule upon the hundreds of intelligent clubwomen whom they are proud to help.  In many libraries there is a standing rule against repeating or discussing the errors and slips of the public, especially to the ever hungry reporter.  I break this rule here with equanimity, and even with a certain degree of hope, for my object is to awaken my readers to the knowledge that part of the reading public is suffering from a malady of some kind.  Later I may try my hand at diagnosis and even at therapeutics.  And I am taking as an illustration chiefly the reading done by women’s clubs, not because men do not do reading of the same kind, or because it is not done by individuals as well as by groups; but because, just at the present time, women in general, and clubwomen in particular, seem especially likely to be attacked by the disease.  It must be remembered also that I am writing from the standpoint of the public library, and I here make humble acknowledgement of the fact that many things in the educational field, both good and bad, go on quite outside of that institution and beyond its ken.