VANISHING FAVORITES

It is nearly twelve months since anyone has lamented the disappearance of our old favorite characters of fiction. While these expressions of sorrow are undoubtedly sincere, they are seldom practical. No one, for instance, has ever suggested any method for the perpetuation of the heroes and villains of the old plays and romances. No one has urged that when the government subsidizes authors, and pensions poets, a sum shall be set aside for such writers as will agree to stick to the old-fashioned characters. Yet it would prove effective.

Of its desirability nothing need be said.

It is no answer to those who regret the passing of their old friends to say that they can still be found in the old books. That is like sending to a museum to view dried bones, some person who yearns to behold the ichthyosaurus splashing among the waves, or the pterodactyl soaring overhead. Indeed, the cases are similar for more than one reason. How greatly would the joy of life increase if we only had a few extinct animals left! The African hunter returns with an assortment of hippopotamuses, elephants, and jubjub birds. It would be more delightful if he could also fetch the mighty glyptodon, the terrible dinotherium, and the stately bandersnatch.

There are few of the old characters of fiction more generally missed than the retired colonel, home from India. He was usually rather portly in figure, though sometimes tall and thin. Always his face was the color of a boiled lobster, and his white moustache and eyebrows bristled furiously. For forty years he had lived exclusively on curries, chutney, and brandy and soda, so his liver was not all it should be.

His temper had not sweetened. He was what you might call irritable.

During forty years he had been lord and master over a regiment of soldiers, and a village of natives, and he had the habit of command.

His favorite remark was: "Br-r-r-r!!"

That is as near as it can be reproduced in print, but from the manner in which his lips rolled when he delivered it, and the explosive force with which it ended, you could see that he had learned it from a Bengal tiger. His was an imposing presence, but his speaking part was not large. In fact, his only contributions to social intercourse were the exclamation which has been quoted, and one other.

This sounded like "Yah!" but it was delivered with a rasping snarl which must be heard to be appreciated. Such was his manner toward his equals; toward servants and underlings he was not so agreeable. On the whole, there was reason to think that he was somehow related to the celebrated personage who "eats 'em alive," or to that other individual called Gritchfang, who "guzzled hot blood, and blew up with a bang."

The colonel was a genial and interesting old "party," and we lament his disappearance.

There was a turtle-dove to coo, however, in the same stories where the colonel roared. This was the dying maiden. She has not altogether left us—her final struggles are protracted. Her dissolution is expected at almost any moment now.

Her specialty was being wan.

Come what might, at any hour of the day or night, under all circumstances, she was very, very wan. You could never catch her forgetting it. She reminded you of Bunthorne's injunction to the twenty lovesick maidens—she made you think of faint lilies.

Usually she lay on a couch in the drawing-room, but she could, with assistance, make her way to the window to wave her handkerchief to Cousin Harry departing to the war. She was in love with Cousin Harry, but knew that he cared most for proud, red-cheeked Sister Gladys. So she suffered in silence, and when Cousin Harry forged a few checks, she bought them up, and arranged a happy marriage between Harry and Gladys—who was in love with someone else.

This was so that she could be a martyr. She loved being a martyr, and was willing to make everyone else intensely uncomfortable in order to accomplish her object. She was very gentle and sweet, and even the Colonel would cease to bellow and snort in her presence.

The really learned heroine has gone for good. She is as rare as the megatherium. Her successors—the women who can discuss a little politics, or who know something about literature—are only collateral descendants. There is some doubt about even that degree of kinship. They are not the real things.

Our old friend had stockings of cerulean blue—though she would have died had she shown half an inch of one of them. Her idea of courtship was to get the hero in a woodland bower and then say something like this:

"Perhaps you have never realized, Mr. Montmorency, how profoundly the philosophy of the Rosicrucians has affected modern thought in its ultimate conception of ontology. The epistemological sciences exhibit the effect of Thales' dictum concerning the fourth state of material cosmogony."

And Mr. Montmorency liked it, too. He had a reply all ready. He wondered if it really was Thales so much as Empedocles or Ctesias. She showed him that his suspicions were groundless. Thales was the man.

He gave up all idea of holding her hand, and listened to a fifteen-minute discourse on the Peripatetics.

After this kind of heroine, is it any wonder that we object to the bridge-playing ladies with a passion for alcohol, who are served to us by the novelist of to-day?

The learned heroine of the old books talked as no one can talk now, except, possibly, a Radcliffe girl with a blue book in front of her, the clock pointing to a quarter of twelve, and a realization that a failure to get B minus in the exam. will make it impossible for her to secure a degree in three years.

The saintly children of the old fiction are perhaps the offspring of the learned heroine and Mr. Montmorency. Certainly such a marriage would result in children of no commonplace type. These, however, tend not so much to scholarship as to good behavior. They would get 98 in all their studies, but 100 plus in deportment.

They are too good to be true. They have enough piety to fit out a convocation of bishops, with a great deal left over. The little girls among them are addicted to the death-bed habit. Only they carry the matter further than the invalid heroine.

They actually die.

The one thing worth living for, in their estimation, is to gather a group of weeping relatives and the minister about their beds on a beautiful morning in June, and then pass serenely away, uttering sentiments of such lofty morality that even the minister feels abashed. The pet lamb, the hoop, the golden curls and the pantalettes, which had been their accessories during seven years in the mortal vale, are cheerfully left behind for the joy of this solemn moment.

There ought to be no dispute over the statement that one other old-fashioned fictitious character is badly missed.

This is the family ghost.

The modern substitute for the real thing is like offering a seat in a trolley car to someone who has been used to a sedan chair. The modern ghost is a ready-made product of a psychological laboratory, and you know that his Bertillon measurements are filed away in a card-catalogue somewhere.

The old ghost used to groan and clank chains, and leave gouts of blood (gouts always—never drops) all over the place.

Or, if it were a lady ghost, she sighed sweetly and slipped out of your bedroom window to the moonlit balcony.

You could get along with ghosts like either of them. You knew what they were up to.

But the ghost of contemporary fiction is as obscure as Henry James. He is a kind of disembodied idea; he never groans, nor clanks chains; and you cannot be sure whether he is a ghost, or a psychological suggestion, or a slight attack of malarial fever. In nothing is the degeneracy and effeminacy of our literature more apparent than in its anæmic ghosts. Hashimura Togo says that "when a Negro janitor sees a ghost, he are a superstition; but when a college professor sees one, he are a scientific phenomenon." When that point has been reached with real ghosts, what can be expected of the fictitious ones?

Along with the family ghost disappeared the faithful old family servant. He was usually a man, and he looked like E. S. Willard as Cyrus Blenkarn. He dressed in snuff-colored clothes, and he bent over, swaying from side to side like a polar-bear in a cage. He rubbed his hands. But he was very devoted to the young mistress.

Lor' bless yer, Sir, he knew her mother, he did, when she was only that high. Carried her in his arms when she was a little babby. But he is afraid something is going wrong with the old place. He doesn't like the looks of things, nohow.

With the superhuman instinct granted to servants, but denied to their superiors, he has become suspicious of the villain on sight. It is lucky that no one believes the old servant, or they would pitch out the villain then and there, and the story would come to an end at Chapter II.

The utter chaos into which villains have fallen has been a cause for regretful comment for years past. Long ago it was pointed out that villains no longer employ direct and honorable methods like murder and assault. The sum of their criminal activities is a stock-market operation that ruins the hero.

Things have gone from bad to worse.

Now you cannot tell which is the villain and which the hero. The old, simple days when the villain, as Mr. J. K. Jerome said, was immediately recognized by the fact that he smoked a cigarette, have long since passed away. Now, the villain and hero in Chapter I. have usually changed places two or three times by the end of the book.

Let no one think that this complaint is made because we regret losing our admiration for the hero. We never had any. He was always such a chuckle-headed ninny that you longed to throw rocks at him from the start.

The lamentable thing is to see the villain falling steadily away from the paths of vice and crime, and taking up with one virtuous practice after another.

Meanwhile, the hero is making feeble efforts at villainy, which result, of course, in complete failure. You cannot learn to be a villain at Chapter XXIV. It is too late. Villains, like poets, are born, not made, and in the older books the faithful servant could tell you that the villain was bad from the cradle. Hereditary influence and unremitting attention to business are as necessary in the villain trade as in any other.

There is one other phase of the making of villains which deserves consideration. That is, their nationality.

Once you had only to know that the man who appeared at Chapter III., twirling his moustache and making polite speeches, was a French count or a Russian prince, to be sure that on him would fall the responsible post of chief villain during the rest of the story.

If the novel were written in America, an English lord could be added to the list. The titled foreigner, whatever he might be, was expected to try to elope with the heroine, for the sake of her money. The hero baffled him finally, and seized the opportunity, at the moment of bafflement, to deliver a few patriotic sentences on the general superiority of republican institutions.

This is all changed. We have had novels and plays with virtuous, even admirable, English lords. Once or twice members of the French nobility have appeared in another capacity than that of advance agent of wickedness. It is time to call a halt, or the first thing we know someone will write a book with a virtuous Russian prince in it.

The line must be drawn somewhere. The mission of Russia in English literature is to furnish tall, smooth, diabolical persons, devoted to vodka, absinthe, oppression of the peasantry, cultivation of a black beard, and general cussedness. We foresee that the novelists will soon have to draw upon Japan for their villains. Much ought to be made of a small, oily, smiling Oriental, who is nursing horrid plots beneath a courteous exterior.

At the time of the first performances of Mr. Moody's play "The Great Divide," it was pleasant to see that a sense of fitness in the nationality of villains had not entirely died out. It may be remembered that the first act represents an American man joining with a Mexican and a nondescript in an atrocious criminal enterprise. At least one newspaper had the sturdy patriotism to call the dramatist to account for insinuating that an American could possibly do such a thing.

"Furriners," perhaps, but Americans, never! Shame on you, Mr. Moody!

While so many of the chief characters of the old fiction have vanished, there is a chorus of minor ones who have also moved away.

Where, for instance, is the village simpleton? He was a useful personage, for he could be depended upon to make the necessary heroic sacrifice in the last chapter but one. When the church steeple burst into flames, or the dam broke and the flood descended on the town, or the secondary villain was tying the heroine's mother to the railroad track, the hero was holding the center of the stage and seeing that the heroine escaped in safety.

But who was that slight figure climbing aloft in the lurid glare of the burning belfry, or swimming across the raging torrent, or running up to the bridge waving a red lantern? Who, indeed, but poor, despised Benny Bilkins, the village idiot? He fell with a crash when the steeple came down, or disappeared forever in the angry, swirling waters, or was ground under the wheels of the locomotive—but then there was a grave for the heroine to strew violets upon, in the last chapter.

The miser, too, has utterly disappeared. In facial characteristics he resembled the faithful old family servant, except that he had deeper lines on his brow. He liked to get out a table, and sit over it with a bag of gold.

No banks for him.

He wanted his gold pieces near at hand, so that he could fetch them out at any hour, clink them together and gloat over them.

He was a clinker and a gloater—he cared for nothing else.

We do not have any misers now. Or, if they exist, they go away to a safety deposit vault, get their bonds and gloat over them. Half the fun is gone, you see. You can gloat over bonds as much as you like, but not a clink can you get out of them. That probably accounts for the disappearance of misers.

We earnestly request some novelist to bring about a resurrection of these characters. They would be welcome in the short stories, as well. During the past fifteen years American fiction has gone through two epochs—the Gadzooks school and the B'Gosh school.

It is now congealed in what may be called the Ten Below Zero School. Any constant reader of the magazines has to keep on his ulster, ear-tabs, mittens and gum-shoes, from one year's end to another. It never thaws. Loggers, miners, trappers, explorers—any kind of persons so long as they dwell in the frozen north—are what the magazine writer adores.

One of Kipling's characters says that there's never a law of God or man runs north of 53. The magazine editors seem to think there's never a thing worth writing of, lives south of 85. Will not some of them dig up one or two of the old characters we have been discussing, and see if they cannot send the thermometer up a few degrees?

We are tired of stamping our feet, blowing on our hands, and rubbing snow on our noses to keep them from falling off.

BY TELEPHONE

"On January 14th," so announced a circular issued last month by the Ezra Beesly Free Public Library of Baxter, "we shall install a telephone service at the library. Telephone your inquiries to the library, and they will be answered over the wire."

Now, January 14th was last Saturday, and this is undoubtedly the first account of the innovation at Baxter.

Miss Pansy Patterson, assistant reference librarian, took her seat at the telephone promptly at nine o'clock, ready to answer all questions. She had, near her, a small revolving bookcase containing an encyclopædia, a dictionary, the Statesman's Year Book, Who's Who in America, Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics, The Old Librarian's Almanack, the Catalogue of the Boston Athenæum, Baedeker's guide book to the United States, Cruden's Concordance, and a few others of the most valuable reference books, in daily use among librarians.

Should this stock fail her she could send the stenographer, Miss Parkinson, on a hurry call to the reading-room, where Miss Bixby, the head reference librarian, would be able to draw on a larger collection of books to find the necessary information.

Mr. Amos Vanhoff, the new librarian of Baxter, stood over the telephone, rubbing his hands in pleasant anticipation of the workings of the new system which he had installed.

The bell rang almost immediately, and Miss Patterson took the receiver from its hook.

"Is this the library?"

"Yes."

"This is Mrs. Humphrey Mayo. I understand that you answer inquiries by telephone? Yes! Thank you. Have you any books about birds?"

"Oh, yes—a great many. Which—"

"Well; I am so much interested in a large bird that has been perching on a syringa bush on our front lawn for the last half hour. It is a very extraordinary-looking bird—I have never seen one like it. I cannot make it out clearly through the opera glass, and I do not dare to go nearer than the piazza for fear of startling it. I only discovered it as I was eating breakfast, and I do not know how long it has been there. None of the bird books I own seem to tell anything about such a bird. Now, if I should describe it to you do you think you could look it up in some of your books?"

"Why, I think so."

"Well, it's a very large bird—like an eagle or a large hawk. And it is nearly all black; but its feathers are very much ruffled up. It has a collar or ruff around its neck, and on its head there is a splash of bright crimson or scarlet. I think it must be some tropical bird that has lost its way. Perhaps it is hurt. Now, what do you suppose it is?"

"You see, I haven't any bird books right at hand—I'll send in to the reading-room. Will you hold the line, please?"

Miss Patterson turned to the stenographer and repeated Mrs. Mayo's description of the strange bird.

"Will you please ask Miss Bixby to look it up, and let me know as soon as possible?"

During the interval that followed, the operator at central asked three times: "Did you get them?" and three times Mrs. Mayo and Miss Patterson chanted in unison: "Yes; hold the line, please!"

Finally the messenger returned, remarking timidly: "He says it's a crow."

"A crow!" exclaimed Miss Patterson.

"A crow!" echoed Mrs. Mayo, at the other end of the wire, "oh, that is impossible. I know crows when I see them. Why, this has a ruff, and a magnificent red coloring about its head. Oh, it's no crow!"

"Whom did you see in there?" inquired Miss Patterson. "Miss Bixby?"

"No," replied the young and timid stenographer, "it was that young man—I don't know his name."

She had entered the library service only the week before.

"Oh, Edgar! He doesn't know anything about anything. Miss Bixby must have left the room for a moment, and I suppose he had brought in a book for a reader. He is only a page—you mustn't ask him any questions. Do go back and see if Miss Bixby isn't there now, and ask her."

A long wait ensued, and as Mrs. Mayo's next-door neighbor insisted on using the telephone to order her dinner from the marketmen, the line had to be abandoned. In ten or fifteen minutes, however, the assistant reference librarian was once more in communication with Mrs. Mayo.

"We think the bird might possibly be a California grebe—but we cannot say for sure. It is either that or else Hawkins's giant kingfisher—unless it has a tuft back of each ear. If it has the tufts, it may be the white-legged hoopoo. But Mr. Reginald Kookle is in the library, and we have asked him about it. You know of Mr. Kookle, of course?"

"What, the author of 'Winged Warblers of Waltham' and 'Common or Garden Birds'?"

"Yes; and of 'Birds I Have Seen Between Temple Place and Boylston Street' and 'The Chickadee and His Children.'"

"Yes, indeed—I know his books very well. I own several of them. What does he think?"

"He is not sure. But Miss Bixby described this bird to him, and he is very much interested. He has started for your house already, because he wants to see the bird."

"Oh, that will be perfectly lovely. Thank you so much. It will be fine to have Mr. Kookle's opinion. Good-by."

"Good-by."

And the conference was ended. It may not be out of place to relate that Mr. Kookle, the eminent bird author, arrived at Mrs. Mayo's a few minutes later. As he heard that the mysterious stranger was on the front lawn, he approached the house carefully from the rear, and climbed over the back fence. He walked around the piazza to the front door, where Mrs. Mayo awaited him.

Mr. Kookle was dressed in his famous brown suit, worn in order that he might be in perfect harmony with the color of dead grass, and hence, as nearly as possible, unseen on the snowless, winter landscape. He had his field glasses already leveled on the syringa bush when Mrs. Mayo greeted him. She carried an opera glass.

"Right there—do you see, Mr. Kookle?"

"Yes, I see him all right."

They both looked intently at the bird. The weather was a little unfavorable for close observation, for, as it may be remembered, Saturday morning was by turns foggy and rainy. A light mist hung over the wet grass now, but the tropical visitor, or whatever he was, could be descried without much difficulty.

He sat, or stood, either on the lower branches of the bush, or amongst them, on the ground. His feathers were decidedly ruffled, and he turned his back toward his observers. His shoulders were a little drawn up, in the attitude usually ascribed by artists to Napoleon, looking out over the ocean from St. Helena's rocky isle. But it was possible, even at that distance, to see his magnificent crimson crest.

Mr. Kookle took a deep breath. "Yes," he said, "I suspected it."

"What?" inquired Mrs. Mayo, eagerly, "What is it?"

"Madam," returned the bird author, impressively, "you have my sincerest congratulations. I envy you. You have the distinction of having been the first observer, to the best of my knowledge, of the only specimen of the Bulbus Claristicus Giganticus ever known to come north of the fourteenth parallel of latitude."

Mrs. Mayo was moved nearly to tears. Never in all her career as a bird enthusiast, not even when she addressed the Twenty Minute Culture Club on "Sparrows I Have Known"—never had she felt the solemn joy that filled her at this minute.

"Are you sure that is what it is?" she asked in hushed tones.

"Absolutely positive," replied the authority, "at least—if I could only get a nearer view of his feet, I could speak with certainty. Now, if we could surround the bush, so to speak, you creeping up from one side and I from the other, we might get nearer to him. I will make a détour to your driveway, and so get on the other side of him. You approach him from the house."

"Just let me get my rubbers," said Mrs. Mayo.

"Please hurry," the other returned.

When the rubbers were procured they commenced their strategic movement. "If I could only be sure that it is the Bulbus!" ejaculated Mr. Kookle.

Mrs. Mayo turned toward him.

"Do you suppose," she whispered, "that it is the great condor of the Andes?"

Mr. Kookle shook his head.

Then they both started again on their stealthy errand. Slowly, quietly, they proceeded until they stood opposite each other, with the syringa and its strange visitant half-way between them. Then Mr. Kookle raised his hand as a signal, and they began to approach the bush. The bird seemed to hear them, for he immediately took interest in the proceedings. He raised his head, hopped out from the bush, and uttered a peculiar, hoarse note that sounded like:

"Craw-w-w-w!"

Mr. Kookle and Mrs. Mayo stopped in their tracks, electrified. Then the bird put its other foot on the ground and gave vent to this remarkable song:

"Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, ker-dar-cut! Ker-dar-cut! Ker-dar-cut!"

Then it gave two or three more raucous squawks, ran toward the fence, flew over it, ran across the street, under Mr. Higgins's fence, and joined his other Black Minorca fowls that were seeking their breakfast in the side yard.

Then Mrs. Mayo returned to the house, and Mr. Reginald Kookle, the author of "Winged Warblers of Waltham" and "The Chickadee and His Children," returned his field glasses to their case, turned up the collar of his famous brown suit, and walked rapidly down the street.

But Miss Patterson had been busy at the library telephone all this time. Scarcely had she ended her conversation with Mrs. Mayo when someone called her to have her repeat "Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night" over the telephone. This was only finished when the bell rang again.

"Hello! This the library?"

"Yes."

"Well, I wish you'd tell me the answer to this. There's a prize offered in the 'Morning Howl' for the first correct answer. 'I am only half as old as my uncle,' said a man, 'but if I were twice as old as he is I should only be three years older than my grandfather, who was born at the age of sixteen. How old was the man?' Now, would you let x equal the age of the uncle, or the man?"

Miss Patterson could not think of any immediate answer to this, nor of any book of reference that would tell her instantly. So she appealed to Mr. Vanhoff, who had returned to the room.

"What was that?" inquired Mr. Vanhoff; "get him to repeat it."

She did so, and the librarian struggled with it for a moment. "Why, it is all nonsense. Tell him that we cannot solve any newspaper puzzles over the telephone. He will have to come to the library."

Then Mrs. Pomfret Smith announced herself on the telephone.

"That the library? Who is this? Miss Patterson? Oh, how do you do? This is so nice of Mr. Vanhoff. I was coming down to the library this morning, but the weather is so horrid that I thought I would telephone instead. Now, my cousin is visiting me, and I have told her about a novel I read last summer, and she is just crazy to read it, too. But I can't for the life of me recall the name of it. Now, do you remember what it was?"

"Why—I'm afraid I don't. Who was the author?"

"That's just the trouble. I can't remember his name to save my life! I'm not even sure that I noticed his name—or her name—whoever it was. I never care much who wrote them—I just look them through, and if they're illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy or anybody like that, I just take them, because I know then they'll be all right. This one had pictures by Christy or Wenzell or one of those men. It was a lovely book—oh, I do wish you could tell me what it was! Where is Miss Anderson? She would know. Isn't she there?"

"No—I am sorry, she will not be here till afternoon. If you could tell me something about the novel—the plot, and so forth, I might have read it myself."

"Oh, of course you've read it. Why, you read all the books that come into the library, don't you?"

"Not quite all."

"You don't? How funny! Why, whatever do you find to do with yourselves down there? You're sure you don't remember the one I want?"

"Why, Mrs. Smith, you haven't told me about the plot of it yet."

"Oh, no, so I haven't. Well—let me see—Um! why, it was about—now, what in the world was it about? Oh dear, I never can think, with this thing up to my ear! What's that, Central? Yes, I got them all right—hold the line, please. Oh dear, I'll have to ring off and think it over, and as soon as I remember, I'll call you up again. Thank you, so much! Good-by."

The next was a man who spoke in a deep voice. "Hello! Is this the library? Have you a history of Peru? You have? Now, that is very fortunate. I do not know how many places I have inquired. I only want a few facts—only a paragraph or two. You can tell them to me over the 'phone, can you not, and I will take them down?"

Miss Patterson had her finger on an article about Peru in the encyclopædia. "'Peru,'" she began to read, "'the ancient kingdom of the Incas—'"

"Of the whichers?" interrupted the man.

"The Incas," she repeated.

"Spell it," he commanded.

"Incas," she spelled.

"Oh, Lord!" said the man, "that's South America. I've been hearing about them all day. The principal of the High School gave me a song and dance about the Incas. I mean Peru, Indiana. Here, I'll come down to the library—this telephone booth is so hot I can't get my breath. Good-by."

Mrs. Pomfret Smith, unlike Jeffries, had come back. She greeted Miss Patterson with enthusiasm.

"Oh, Miss Patterson, I've remembered all about it now. You see, it starts this way. There is a girl, a New York girl, who has married an English lord, or, rather, she is just going to marry him—the brother of the first man she was engaged to steps in, and tells her that the lord isn't genuine, and he presents her maid with a jeweled pin which his mother, the countess, received from her husband—her first husband, that is—three days after the battle of—oh, I don't know the name of the battle—the 'Charge of the Light Brigade,' it was, and he was in that—no, his uncle was, and he said to his tent-mate, the night before the battle: 'Charley, I'm not coming out of this alive, and my cousin will be the lawful heir, but I want you to take this and dig with it underneath the floor of the old summer house, and the papers that you will find there will make Gerald a rich man.' And so he took it and when he got to Washington he handed it to the old family servant who hadn't seen him for sixty years, and then dropped dead, so they never knew whether he was the real one or only the impostor, and so just as the wedding was about to take place the uncle—he was a senator—said to the bishop, who was going to marry them: 'Please get off this line, I am using it!' And so it never took place, after all. Now, can you tell me what the name of the book is, Miss Patterson?"

"Why, I am afraid I do not recognize it. It sounds a little like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Ouida and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and someone else, all at once. Was it by any of them, Mrs. Smith?"

"Oh, no, I am sure it was not. Why, I am surprised—I thought you would know it now, without any hesitation!"

"I am sorry."

"Oh, very well, then. Good-by."

The last in a tone as acid and cold as lemon ice. It seemed to express Mrs. Smith's opinion of all librarians. Miss Patterson was much grieved, but the telephone bell rang again before she had time to reflect.

"Is this the library? Oh, yes. I wonder if you have a life of Mrs. Browning?"

"Yes—I think so. What would you like to know about her?"

"Well, there—I am certainly glad. This is Miss Crumpet, you know! Miss Hortense Crumpet. I have had such a time. Have you the book right there? I do wish you would—"

"If you will wait just a minute, I will send for the book—I haven't it here."

"Oh, thank you so much."

The book was fetched, and Miss Patterson informed Miss Crumpet that she now held the volume ready.

"Have you it right there?"

"Yes."

"Well, I want to see a picture of Mrs. Browning. We have a portrait here, and my aunt says it is George Eliot, and I know it is Mrs. Browning. Now, if you could just hold up the book—why, how perfectly ridiculous of me! I can't see it over the telephone, can I? Why, how absolutely absurd! I never thought at all! I was going to come to the library for it, only it is so horrid and rainy, and then I remembered that I saw in the paper about your answering questions by telephone, and I thought, why, how nice, I'll just call them up on the 'phone—and now it won't do me any good at all, will it?"

"I'm afraid not."

"And I'll have to come to the library after all. Oh, dear! Good-by."

"Good-by."

The bell rang again as soon as the receiver had been replaced.

"Hello! How are you for pigs' feet to-day?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Pigs' feet! How many yer got?"

"This is the public library. Did you call for us?"

"Who? The what? No; I'm trying to get Packer and Pickleums. I don't want no public library. What's the matter with that girl at central? This is the third time—"

His conversation ended abruptly as the receiver was hung up. Miss Patterson was soon called again. Mrs. Pomfret Smith was once more unto the breach.

"Miss Patterson? I've remembered some more about that book, now. It had a bright red cover and the name of it was printed in gilt letters. It was about so high—oh, I forgot, you can't see over the telephone, can you? Well, it was about as big as books usually are, you know, and it was quite thick—oh, it must have had a hundred or two hundred pages—perhaps more than that, I am not sure. And the front picture was of a girl—the heroine, I guess, and a man, and he had his arms around her and she was looking up into his face. Now, you can remember what book it was, can't you, Miss Patterson?"