a small or a full dose of Alger (we do not admit 'Optic'), they
are very ready to be promoted to something more substantial--
Knox, Butterworth, Coffin, Sparks, or Abbott. I find more
satisfaction in directing the minds of boys than girls, for
though I may and generally do succeed in interesting them in the
very best of fiction, it is much more difficult to draw them into
other channels, unless it is poetry. I should like very much to
know if this is the experience of other librarians. My aim is
first to interest girls or boys according to their ability to
enjoy or appreciate, and gradually to develop whatever taste is
the most prominent. For instance, I put on the shelves all
mechanical books for boys; works upon adornments for
homes--painting, drawing, music, aids to little housekeepers,
etc., for the girls."

Mr. Fletcher, of the Watkinson Library, Hartford, Conn., says, in
a recent address on the public library question in its moral and
religious aspect: "Many of our public libraries beg the whole
question, so far as it refers to the youngest readers, by
excluding them from the use of books. A limit of fourteen or
sixteen years is fixed, below which they are not admitted to the
library as its patrons. But, in some of those more recently
established, the wiser course has been adopted of fixing no such
limitation. For, in these times, there is little probability that
exclusion from the library will prevent their reading. Poor,
indeed, in resources must be the child who cannot now buy, beg,
or borrow a fair supply of reading of some kind; so that
exclusion from the library is simply a shutting up of the boy or
girl to the resources of the home and the book-shop or newspaper.
A slight examination of the literature found in a majority of