to seem censorious, but if
ever there was a visible, unctuous, tangible, actual thick silence, a
silence that can be proved, if ever there was a silence that stood up
and flourished and swung its hat, that silence is in our library. The
way our librarian's assistants go tiptoeing and reverberating around the
room--well--it's one of those things that follow a man always, follow
his inmost being all his life. It gets in with the books--after a few
years or so. One can feel the tiptoeing going on in a book--one of our
library books--when one gets home with it. It is the spirit of the
place. Everything that comes out of it is followed and tiptoed around by
our librarian's assistants' silence. They are followed about by it
themselves. The thick little blonde one, with the high yellow hair,
lives in our ward. One feels a kind of hush rimming her around, when one
meets her on the street.

Now I do not wish to claim that librarians' assistants can possibly be
blamed, in so many words, either for this, or for any of the other
things that seem to make them (in our library, at least) more prominent
than the books. Everything in a library seems to depend upon something
in it that cannot be put into words. It seems to be a kind of spirit. If
the spirit is the wrong spirit, not all the librarians in the world, not
even the books themselves can do anything about it.

* * * * *

Postscript. I do hope that no one will suppose from this chapter that I
am finding fault or think I am finding fault with our assistant
librarians. I am merely finding fault with them (may Heaven forgive
them!) because I cannot. It doesn't seem to make very much
difference--their doing certain things or not doing them. They either do
them or they don't do them--whichever it is--with the same spirit. They
are not really down in their hearts true to the books. One can hardly
help feeling vaguely, persistently resentful over having them about
presiding over the past. One never catches them--at least I never
do--forgetting themselves. One never comes on one loving a book. They
seem to be servants,--most of them,--book chambermaids. They do not care
anything about a library as a library. They just seem to be going around
remembering rules in it.

IV

etc.

The P. G. S. of M. as good as said the other day, when I had been trying
as well as I could to express something of this kind, that the real
trouble with the modern librar