relation of her public library work a type and model for all who
have to do with children.... Miss Hewins's paper was really a
delightful bit of literary autobiography, and she has now happily
acceded to a request from the Journal to fill out the outlines
into a more complete record."

Not long ago I went into the public library of a university town
in England and established confidence by saying, "I see that
Chivers does your binding," whereupon the librarian invited me
inside the railing. A boy ten or twelve years old was standing in
a Napoleonic attitude, with his feet very far apart, before the
fiction shelves, where the books were alphabetized under authors,
but with apparently nothing to show him whether a story was a
problem-novel or a tale for children. My thoughts went back many
years to the days when I first became the librarian of a
subscription library in Hartford, where novels and children's
stories were roughly arranged under the first letter of the
title, and not by authors. There was a printed catalog, but
without anything to indicate in what series or where in order of
the series a story-book belonged, and it was impossible when a
child had read one to find out what the next was except from the
last page of the book itself or the advertisements in the back
and they had often been torn out for convenient reference.

My technical equipment was some volunteer work in a town library,
a little experience in buying for a Sunday-school library, and
about a year in the Boston Athenaeum. The preparation that I had
had for meeting children and young people in the library was,
besides some years of teaching, a working knowledge of the books
that had been read and re-read in a large family for twenty-five