It was pleasant work, filling the empty shelves; moreover, I was in my element. It was good to see books about again; I owed so much to them. "This is what the room needed," I said, placing the last of the historical works on a lower shelf. "Yes; what a difference it makes, doesn't it? Oh, I say, mother, here 's one of your late favorites!" "What is it?" "Memoirs of Doctor Barnardo." "I must read them again." "Who was Doctor Barnardo?" I asked; I was curious. "If you don't know of him and his London work, then you have a treat before you in this book." Mrs. Macleod spoke with unusual enthusiasm. "And he was Ewart's friend too. I might have known I should find this among his books. It always seems to me as if it were 'books and the man'. Show me what books are a man's familiars, and I 'll tell you his characteristics." "No, really, can you do that?" I asked, surprised at this dictum from such youthful lips. "Yes, in a general way I can. Look at this for instance." He held out a volume. "The man who has this book for an inner possession, and also on his shelves, is a thinker, broad-minded, scholarly, human to an intense degree--" "What is it?" I said, impatient to see. "Something you don't know, I 'll wager; it is n't a woman's book." "Now, Jamie Macleod, read your characteristics of men, if you can, by the books they read and love, but, please, please, keep within your masculine 'sphere of influence', and don't presume to say what is or what is n't a woman's book. I know a good deal more about those than you do--what is the book anyway?" I confess his overbearing ways about women provoke me at times. But he paid no heed to my little temper. "It's dear old Murray's 'Rise of the Greek Epic'--it comes next to the Bible. It's an English book; you would n't be apt to read it." "Oh, would n't I?" I exclaimed, and determined another forty-eight hours should not pass without my having made myself familiar with the rise of the Greek epic, and the fall of it, for that matter. I swallowed my indignation, for the truth was I had not heard of it. "And here 's another--American, this time, and right up to date. I 'll wager you never heard of this either. Would n't I know just by the title it would be Ewart's!" "How would you know?" "Oh, because any man of his calibre would have it." And I was no wiser than before. I was beginning to realize that there was a whole world of experience of which I knew nothing; that, in my struggle to exist in the conditions of the city so far away, I had grown self-centered and, in consequence, narrow, not open to the world of others. Jamie Macleod, with his twenty-three years, was opening my inward eye. I can't say that what I saw of myself was pleasing. "What is the book?" I asked, after a moment's silence in which Mrs. Macleod was busy with the "Memoirs", and Jamie was looking over titles. "'The Anthracite Coal Industry'."