aid
their initiation fees in indigo; they paid their annual dues in indigo;
and presently they found their treasury so full and overflowing with
indigo, that they resolved to devote their surplus in part to the
formation of the Indigo Society Library. Then, too, at about the same
time in Charleston, seventeen young men, of very limited means, desirous
of seeing the best and freshest English magazines, formed a club for
that purpose, and started with a fund of ten pounds sterling, not
venturing at first to hope to be able to purchase books also. Soon,
however, their plan grew and took in books; and from this small
beginning arose the great "Library Society" of Charleston, which has
ministered to the pleasure and benefit of the people of that place for
nearly a century and a half.

But the Philadelphia plan travelled northward as well as southward. In
1747, at Newport, Rhode Island, was formed, also out of a discussion
club, the famous Redwood Library, which lives and flourishes still. In
1753 the Providence Library was started on the same general plan; in
1754, the New York Society Library; in 1760, the Social Library at
Salem, Massachusetts; in 1763, similar libraries at Lancaster and at
Portland, Maine; in 1753, a similar one at Hingham; and so on throughout
the country.

One of the most curious of these joint-stock library associations was
one formed in 1751 in three parishes in the towns of York and Kittery,
Maine, and called the "Revolving Library." It was not a circulating
library--that being the name of a library from which the books circulate
singly and in units; but it was called a "revolving library" because the
entire library was to revolve, in bulk, on its own axes, in an orbit
including the parsonages of the three parishes embraced in the scheme.
And thus this library began to revolve from parsonage to parsonage more
than 130 years ago; and it has been revolving ever since, occasionally
encountering some queer experiences, as when, about 15 years ago, it was
found by the new pastor of Kittery Point in the garret of the parsonage,
"dumped down on the attic floor like a load of coal," the wife of the
former incumbent having had a prejudice against books for sanitary
reasons, "considering them unhealthy, and so being unwilling to have
them in any living room" where their presence might communicate diseases
to the family.

This, of course, is a rather eccentric specimen of the class of
libraries now under vi