That very week Mr. Mapleson called at my house to express the same idea. "What can we do to shut up Poole's?" said he. "It's dreadful. Half our young men spend half their evenings there lounging and drinking away their time." He proposed half a dozen plans and abandoned them as fast as he proposed them. He suggested that we organize a Sons of Temperance, and gave it up because neither of us believed in secret societies; suggested organizing a Band of Hope in the Sabbath-school, but withdrew the suggestion on my remarking that the Sabbath-school would not touch the class that made Poole's bar the busiest place in town; hinted at trying to get John B. Gough, but doubted whether he could be obtained. I told him I would think it over. And the next evening I walked up to Poole's to survey the ground a little. I found, just as you turn the corner from the Main street to go up the hill, what I had never noticed before-a sign, not very legible from old age and dirt, "Free Reading-room." Having some literary predilections, I went in. A bar-room, with three or four loungers before the counter, occupied the foreground. In the rear were two round wooden tables. On one were half a dozen copies of notorious sensation sheets, one or two with infamous illustrations. A young lad of sixteen was gloating over the pages of one of them. The other table was ornamented with a backgammon board and a greasy pack of cards. The atmosphere of the room was composed of the commingled fumes of bad liquor, bad tobacco, kerosene oil and coal gas. It did not take me long to gauge the merits of the free reading-room. But I inwardly thanked the proprietor for the suggestion it afforded me. "A free reading-room," said I to myself; "that is what we want at Wheathedge." The same thought had fortunately occurred almost simultaneously to my friend Mr. Korley, though his reason for desiring its establishment were quite different from mine. His family spends every summer at Wheathedge. His wife and daughters found themselves at a loss how to spend their time. They had nothing to do. They pestered Mr. Korley to bring them up the last novels. But his mind was too full of stocks; he always forgot the novels. On Saturday he went over to Newtown, hearing there was a circulating library there. He found the sign, but no books. "I had some books once," the proprietor explained, "but the Wheathedge folks carried them all off and never returned them." Thus it happened that when the week after my visit to the free reading-room, I met Mr. Korley on board the train, he remarked to me, "We ought to have a circulating library at Wheathedge." "And a reading-room with it," said I. "Well, yes," said he. "That's a fact. A good reading-room would be a capital thing." "Think of the scores of young men," said I, "that are going down to ruin there. They have no home, no decent shelter even for a winter's evening, except the grog-shop."