lain that the new branch of the Public Library
opened there has interfered with their business. Beside encouraging
the use of a lending library, the visitor should be ready to lend
books, newspapers, and magazines, and should be glad to borrow a book
from the family, when this will help to strengthen friendly relations.

The refining influence of good pictures is just beginning to be
recognized by the charitable. Friendly visitors cannot always organize
large loan exhibitions, such as are given in the poorer neighborhoods
of London, New York, and Boston, but they can lend a good photograph or
engraving, when they are going away, and can replace it, from time to
time, by another picture. Such loans have {134} been known, like the
Eastlake screen in Stockton's story, to revolutionize the arrangement
of the household. Then, too, a picture often conveys a lesson more
effectively than a sermon can. Mrs. Barnett tells, in "Practicable
Socialism," [1] of a loan exhibition in Whitechapel, where Oxford
students acted as guides and explained the pictures. "Mr. Schmalz's
picture of 'Forever' had one evening been beautifully explained, the
room being crowded by some of the humblest people, who received the
explanation with interest, but in silence. The picture represented a
dying girl to whom her lover had been playing his lute, until, dropping
it, he seemed to be telling her with impassioned words that his love is
stronger than death, and that, in spite of the grave and separation, he
will love her _forever_. I was standing outside the exhibition in the
half-darkness, when two girls, hatless, with one shawl between them
thrown round both their shoulders, came out. They might not be living
the worst life, but, if not, they were low down enough to be familiar
with it, and to see {135} in it only the relation between men and
women. The idea of love lasting beyond this life, making eternity
real, a spiritual bond between man and woman, had not occurred to them
until the picture with the simple story was shown them. 'Real
beautiful, ain't it all?' said one. 'Ay, fine, but that "Forever" I
did take on with that,' was the answer."

I have lived nearly all my life in a community where, during the last
twenty-five years, there has been a great change in musical taste.
George Peabody left money to found a Conservatory of Music, and a few
music lovers spent time and money to keep alive an Oratorio Society.
Later, the visits of T