nces a privilege. The sooner we unveil the
"gods of joy and good fellowship" in our library the better; the sooner
we make the library a centre for all the activities among us that make
for social efficiency the better.

Of course there are natural limitations to the kind of work which a
library can do, and in helping to further the spirit of good fellowship
and to furnish pleasure, we must keep within such limits as are
consistent with the spirit of a library. The library can appeal to
people in other ways than by books alone, as we shall consider later,
yet as books are our chief tools, it is natural to think first of giving
pleasure by that method. One of our chiefest ways of late years has been
through the children's room. The children get book instruction and
supplementary reading and enforced book interests, all of which are
needed for their development, in the schoolroom. But in the children's
room at the library furnished especially for them, with low tables,
picture books and low shelves containing fairy stories and all their
favorite authors, they settle down to satisfy their own especial
individual tastes. Then there is the story hour, of which we shall hear
to-morrow. Many of the children have never learned the pleasure of
reading. They do not belong to cultured homes and the presence of books.
Many of them never heard a Mother Goose jingle or a nonsense verse, and
a book is an unlearned delight. But what child, even of this kind, does
not love to hear stories, and listening breathlessly, would not come
again and again. Somehow it seems as if we could not discharge our
social obligation until we had gone into the by-ways and hedges and
gathered in these scraps of society, and taught them the pleasures of a
book. The children, once acquainted with the library, will always count
it among their friends, and it will forever remain a social centre to
them.

We grown ups are not so different from the children; we, too, like a
story, and we, too, want to read the things that cheer and entertain us.
We agreed a moment ago that we, as well as our public, were liable to
leave the serious books for the infrequent study hour and to spend our
leisure evenings with the fascinating novel. Well, I do not know of any
better way to give amusement and pleasure than to furnish the people
with the books they want, in which they can be interested and absorbed.
The "cares that infest the day" will fold their wings better under th