No one who is listless or indifferent in the discharge of daily duties is fit for a place in a public library. There should be an _esprit de corps_, a zeal for his profession, which will lead him to make almost any sacrifice of outside interests to become proficient in it. Thus only will he render himself indispensable in his place, and do the greatest amount of service to the greatest number of readers. I have seen employees in libraries so utterly careless of what belongs to their vocation, as to let books, totally unfit for use, ragged or broken, or with plates loosened, ready to drop out and disappear, go back to the shelves unrepaired, to pursue the downward road toward destruction. And I have been in many libraries in which the books upon the shelves exhibited such utter want of care, such disarrangement, such tumbling about and upside-down chaos, and such want of cleanliness, as fairly to make one's heart ache. In some cases this may have been due in great part to unwise free admission of the public to the shelves, and consequent inevitable disorder; in others, it may be partially excused by the librarian's absolute want of the needful help or time, to keep the library in order; but in others, it was too apparent that the librarian in charge took no interest in the condition of the books. Too many librarians (at least of the past, however it may now be) have been of the class described by Dr. Poole, the Chicago librarian. He said that library trustees too often appeared to think that anybody almost would do for a librarian; men who have failed in everything else, broken-down clergymen, or unsuccessful teachers, and the like. Passing now to other needful qualifications of librarians and library assistants, let me say that one of the foremost is accuracy. Perhaps I have before this remarked that exact accuracy is one of the rarest of human qualities. Even an approximation to it is rare, and absolute accuracy is still rarer. Beware of the person who is sure of every thing--who retails to you a conversation he has heard, affecting to give the exact words of a third person, or who quotes passages in verse or in prose, with glib assurance, as the production of some well-known writer. The chances are ten to one that the conversation is mainly manufactured in the brain of the narrator, and that the quotation is either not written by the author to whom it is attributed, or else is a travesty of his real language. It is Lord Byron who tells of that numerous class of sciolists whom one finds everywhere-- "With just enough of learning to misquote."