My technical equipment was some volunteer work in a town library, a little experience in buying for a Sunday-school library, and about a year in the Boston Athenaeum. The preparation that I had had for meeting children and young people in the library was, besides some years of teaching, a working knowledge of the books that had been read and re-read in a large family for twenty-five years, from Miss Edgeworth and Jacob Abbott, an old copy of "Aesop's fables," Andersen, Grimm, Hawthorne, "The Arabian nights," Mayne Reid's earlier innocent even if unscientific stories, down through "Tom Brown," "Alice in Wonderland," Our Young Folks, the Riverside Magazine, "Little women," to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell. These books were in the Hartford Young Men's Institute, but they were little read in comparison with the works of the "immortal four," who were then writing series at the rate of two or more volumes a year--Optic, Alger, Castlemon and Martha Finley--and still refuse to be forgotten. The older girls demanded Ouida, a new name to me, but I read some of her novels before I had been in the library many weeks, and remember writing a letter to a daily paper giving an outline of the plot of one of them as a hint to fathers and mothers of what their schoolgirl daughters were reading. I think that there was something about boys, too, in the letter, and a plea for "Ivanhoe" and other books of knightly adventure. The Young Men's Institute Library in Hartford was a survival from the days of subscription libraries and lecture courses. The city had then a population of about fifty thousand, of whom some five or six hundred were subscribers to the library, paying three dollars for the use of one book at a time or five dollars for two, including admission to the periodical room. Hartford had a large number of Irish inhabitants, some Germans, a few of whom were intelligent and prosperous Jews, a few French Canadians, possibly still fewer Scandinavians. It was several years before the first persecution of the Russian and Polish Jews sent them to this country. In the year when I came, 1875, there were forty-six boys and girls in the high school graduating class, all, from their names and what I know of some of them, apparently of English descent, except one whose name is Scotch. The class which was graduated last June had about 650 members on entering, and 250 at the end of its course. Among the names are Italian, Hebrew, Swedish, Irish, German, Danish, Spanish, Bohemian, Armenian--the largest percentage from families not of English descent being Hebrew.