“Our club wishes to discuss her contributions to American literature.”

Now the Brown family has been active in letters, from Charles Brockden down to Alice, but no one seems to know of Susanna H. The librarian contrived to put off the matter until she could make some investigations of her own, but, all the resources of the central reference room proving unequal to the task, she timidly asked the clubwoman, at her next visit, to solve the problem.

“Oh, we don’t know who Susanna H. Brown was; that is why we came to you for information!”

“But where did you find the name?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly; but one of our members, in a conversation with some one who knows a lot about literature—­I forget just who it was—­was told that Susanna H. Brown had rendered noteworthy services to American literature.  We’ve got to find out, for her name is already printed on the programme!”

I don’t know what was said of Miss, or Mrs. Brown at the meeting; but my opinion is that this particular item on the programme had to be omitted.

Another lady entered a library abruptly and said “I want your books on China.”

“Do you mean the country of that name? or are you looking up porcelain?”

First perplexity and then dismay spread over the lady’s face.  “Why, I don’t know,” she faltered.  “The program just said China!”

A university professor was once asked by one of these program committees for a list of references on German folklore—­a subject to which it had decided that its club should devote the current season.  The list, as furnished, proved rather stiff, and the astonished professor received forthwith the following epistle (quoted from memory): 

“DEAR PROFESSOR—­

“Thank you so much for the folk-lore; but we have changed our minds and have decided to study the Chicago Drainage Canal instead.”

This hap-hazard method of programme-making is not confined to club papers, as the following anecdote will show: 

An officer of a woman’s club entered a library and said that she thought it would be nice to vary the usual literary programme by the introduction of story-telling, and she asked for aid from the library staff.  It was a busy season and as the librarian hesitated the clubwoman added hastily that the whole programme need not occupy more than half an hour.  “We want the very simplest things, told in a few words, so that it will really be no trouble at all.”

Pressed to be more specific, she went on:  “Well—­no story must take more than three minutes, and we want Little Nell, Louis IX, Moses in the Bulrushes, the Princes in the Tower, Cinderella, Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Holy Night and Louis XI.

“You see that allowing three minutes apiece would bring them all within twenty-four minutes—­less than half an hour, just as I said.

“And—­oh, yes! we want the storyteller to sit on a platform, and just in front of her we will pose a group of little girls, all in white frocks.  Won’t that be nice?”