writes a letter which would instantly mark him as a man of high
merit among the multitude.

But I once knew a man who put a help-wanted "ad" in the paper. He ran a
hotel, and he advertised for a clerk. I was stopping at his place at the
time, I and my three brothers. And the five of us, Mr. Snuvel (the hotel
man), I, and my three brothers, used to bring up from the village every
night for a week (the place was in the country) the mail, which consisted
of replies to this help-wanted advertisement. We used large sacks for
this purpose.

XVI

HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS

A literary adventurer not long since found himself, by one of the
exigencies incident to his precarious career, turning over in the process
of cataloguing a kind of literature in which up to that time he had been
very little read, a public collection of published municipal documents.
This gentleman had had a notion for a good many years that municipal
documents were entirely for very serious people engaged in some useful
undertakings. He had never conceived of them as works of humour and
objects of art. But his disinclination to this department of pure
literature was dissolved, as most prejudices may be, by acquaintance with
the subject.

Municipal documents are human documents. They are the autobiographies of
communities. The personalities of Topeka, Kansas, of Limoges, France,
and of Heidelberg, Germany, rise before the impressionable student of
municipal documents like the figures of personal autobiography, like
Benvenuto Cellini, Marie Bashkirtsev, Benjamin Franklin, Miss Mary
Maclane, Mr. George Moore.

A very touching quality in municipal documents is their naivete--that
unavoidable and unconscious self-revelation which is much of the great
charm and value of all autobiographies. By the way, do statisticians
really understand municipal documents, or do they think them valuable
simply because they are full of statements of fact?

Our literary gentleman, at all events, found his task very engaging,
though as a cataloguer he was much perplexed by the extraordinary
informality, in one respect, of formal public papers, a curious
provinciality, as he could but take it to be, of municipalities. A very
common neglect, he found, in such publications is to make any mention
anywhere of the relation to geography of the community chronicling its
history.

He would read, for instance, that the pamphlet in his hand was the
"Auditor's Repor