years, from Miss Edgeworth and Jacob Abbott, an old copy of
"Aesop's fables," Andersen, Grimm, Hawthorne, "The Arabian
nights," Mayne Reid's earlier innocent even if unscientific
stories, down through "Tom Brown," "Alice in Wonderland," Our
Young Folks, the Riverside Magazine, "Little women," to Scott,
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Mrs.
Gaskell. These books were in the Hartford Young Men's Institute,
but they were little read in comparison with the works of the
"immortal four," who were then writing series at the rate of two
or more volumes a year--Optic, Alger, Castlemon and Martha
Finley--and still refuse to be forgotten. The older girls
demanded Ouida, a new name to me, but I read some of her novels
before I had been in the library many weeks, and remember writing
a letter to a daily paper giving an outline of the plot of one of
them as a hint to fathers and mothers of what their schoolgirl
daughters were reading. I think that there was something about
boys, too, in the letter, and a plea for "Ivanhoe" and other
books of knightly adventure.

The Young Men's Institute Library in Hartford was a survival from
the days of subscription libraries and lecture courses. The city
had then a population of about fifty thousand, of whom some five
or six hundred were subscribers to the library, paying three
dollars for the use of one book at a time or five dollars for
two, including admission to the periodical room. Hartford had a
large number of Irish inhabitants, some Germans, a few of whom
were intelligent and prosperous Jews, a few French Canadians,
possibly still fewer Scandinavians. It was several years before
the first persecution of the Russian and Polish Jews sent them to
this country. In the year when I came, 1875, there were