The second year I became a member of the Examining Committee of the Public Library of the city of Boston. My position on this committee for my first year of service was a minor one. There was never anything very important to do, certainly not enough to keep up one's interest to the point of being a live interest. Moreover, I spent the winter away from town. But I had the great good fortune to pass it in the mountains of North Carolina. There I lived for weeks at a time in the homes and cabins of the mountain whites. I knew the men their wives, their children. I visited the logging camps, the mines, the missions, the mills, the schools. The life was rough, but it was worth while. It gave me an intimate knowledge of the social surroundings of the people, and I found the one vital problem, the problem touching the citizen the nearest, to be that of the rural school, and affiliated with the rural school, though affiliated in a crude way, was the library. Thus, for the second time in my life, I came into contact with the library by means of the school. This coincidence led me to think, and I reasoned out that library workers North and South must be working along similar lines toward unity in practice. Both were doing educative work. And both, apparently, had the same goal--the reaching of the parent or adult through the child or through child growth. How far such work was legitimate work, how far such work had intellectual or educational value, how far such work lacked or had balance, I now wished to determine. To do this it was necessary to assume some line of active investigation; also to study results from the standpoint of the library, as well as from that of the school and the citizen. There was no need to search for a subject. I had it at hand. Living as I did with the people I found myself in the very center of the rural library movement--a movement so splendid in conception; so successful in results, if statistics are credited; so direct as to method, the entire appropriation being expended on but two things, books and bookcases; so naively simple as to administration, there being neither librarians, libraries, or pay-rolls--that a study of it could not fail to prove helpful.