Occasionally the librarian who serves children will have to take account of stock, sum up the changes for better or for worse in the use and treatment of the room, in the manners and habits of the children and in their reading. She will have to retire a little from her work, take a bird's-eye view of it, and decide if on the whole progress is making toward her ideal. Without identifying itself with any of the movements such as the kindergarten, child-study, and social settlement, without losing control of itself and resigning itself to any outside guidance, the children's library should still absorb what is to its purpose in the work of all these agencies. "This one thing I do," the librarian may have to keep reminding herself, to keep from being drawn off into other issues, but by standing a little apart she may see what is to her advantage without being sucked in by the draft as some enthusiastic movement sweeps by. Must she have no enthusiasm? Yes, indeed; but is not that a better enthusiasm which enables one to work on steadily for years with undiminished courage than the kind that exhausts itself in the great vivacity of its first feeling and effort? It will not be long after the opening of the children's library before an insight will be gained into domestic interiors and private lives that will make the librarian wish she could follow many a child to his home, in order to secure for him and his something better than the few hours' respite from practical life which they may get from the reading of books. When the boy who steals and the girl who is vicious before they are in their teens, have to be sent away lest other children suffer, it is borne in upon the librarian that a staff of home-missionaries connected with the library to follow up and minister in such cases would not be a bad thing--and she has to remind herself again and again that it is not incumbent on any one person to attempt everything, and that Providence has other instrumentalities at work besides herself. The humors of the situation, on the other hand, are many. The boys who, being sent home to wash their hands, return in an incredibly short time with purified palms and suppressed giggles, and on persistent inquiry confess, "We just licked 'em," present to one who is "particular" only a serio-comic aspect; and the little squirrel who wriggles to the top of the librarian's chair until he can reach her ear, and then whispers into it, "There couldn't be no library here 'thout you, could there?" is not altogether laughable; but incidents of pure comedy are occasionally to be set over against the serious side.