The child in question, however, would have had no basis for understanding the chance sympathy had she overheard the words. Her books were her dearest joy. They were indeed in a very real sense her only tangible possessions. All else was as yet "the stuff that dreams are made of." As she walked through the dingy, sordid streets her glorified eyes looked past the glimpses of unlovely life about her into a beautiful world of her own. If she felt any weight from the books she carried it was just a comfortable reminder that this new Mary Antin and the new life of glorious opportunity were real. When she climbed the two flights of stairs to her wretched tenement her soul was not soiled by the dirt and squalor through which she passed. As she eagerly read, not only her school history but also every book she could find in the public library about the heroes of America, she did not see the moldy paper hanging in shreds from the walls or the grimy bricks of the neighboring factory that shut out the sunlight. Her look was for the things beyond the moment--the things that really mattered. How could the child feel poor and deprived when she knew that the city of Boston was hers! As she walked every afternoon past the fine, dignified buildings and churches that flanked Copley Square to the imposing granite structure that held all her hero books, she walked as a princess into her palace. Could she not read for herself the inscription at the entrance: Public Library--Built by the People--Free to All--? Now she stood and looked about her and said, "This is real. This all belongs to these wide-awake children, these fine women, these learned men--and to _me_." Every nook of the library that was open to the public became familiar to her; her eyes studied lovingly every painting and bit of mosaic. She spent hours pondering the vivid pictures by Abbey that tell in color the mystic story of Sir Galahad and the quest of the Holy Grail, and it seemed as if the spirit of all romance was hers. She lingered in the gallery before Sargent's pictures of the "Prophets," and it seemed as if the spirit of all the beautiful Sabbaths of her childhood stirred within her, as echoes of the Hebrew psalms awoke in her memory. [Illustration: © _Falk_ Mary Antin] When she went into the vast reading-room she always chose a place at the end where, looking up from her books, she could get the effect of the whole vista of splendid arches and earnest readers. It was in the courtyard, however, that she felt the keenest joy. Here the child born in the prison of the Pale realized to the full the glorious freedom that was hers.