writer lives on and on, inspiring age after age of readers, and
has in it more of the seeds of immortality than anything upon earth.

CHAPTER 10.

AIDS TO READERS.

There is one venerable Latin proverb which deserves a wider recognition
than it has yet received. It is to the effect that "the best part of
learning is to know where to find things." From lack of this knowledge,
an unskilled reader will often spend hours in vainly searching for what a
skilled reader can find in less than five minutes. Now, librarians are
presumed to be skilled readers, although it would not be quite safe to
apply this designation to all of that profession, since there are those
among librarians, or their assistants, who are mere novices in the art of
reading to advantage. Manifestly, one cannot teach what he does not know:
and so the librarian who has not previously travelled the same road, will
not be able to guide the inquiring reader who asks him to point out the
way. But if the way has once been found, the librarian, with only a
fairly good memory, kept in constant exercise by his vocation, can find
it again. Still more surely, if he has been through it many times, will
he know it intuitively, the moment any question is asked about it.

It is true of the great majority of readers resorting to a library, that
they have a most imperfect idea, both of what they want, and of the
proper way to find it. The world of knowledge, they know, is vast, and
they are quite bewildered by the many paths that lead to some part or
other of it, crossing each other in all directions. And among the
would-be readers may be found every shade of intelligence, and every
degree of ignorance. There is the timid variety, too modest or diffident
to ask for any help at all, and so feeling about among the catalogues or
other reference-books in a baffled search for information. There is the
sciolist variety, who knows it all, or imagines that he does, and who
asks for proof of impossible facts, with an assurance born of the
profoundest ignorance. Then, too, there is the half-informed reader, who
is in search of a book he once read, but has clean forgotten, which had a
remarkable description of a tornado in the West, or a storm and
ship-wreck at sea, or a wonderful tropical garden, or a thrilling escape
from prison, or a descent into the bowels of the earth, or a tremendous
snow-storm, or a swarming flight of migratory birds, or a mausoleum of
departed king