It was really one of the most hopeless places I have ever seen. The bad element had got the upper hand from the first. There were five saloons, and several low dance-halls and pool-rooms. There was no resident minister, and they had preaching only once in two weeks by an overworked Baptist preacher with much goodwill and little tact in managing so difficult a community. I always make it a point to get the ministers to help me first of all, but here it was useless. So I appealed to the school-teacher, the doctor, and the mill-owner. The latter took little interest, although I assured him that anything that could entice his workmen from the saloon would make them serve him better. The little school-mistress talked to her children about it, but with no success; the doctor was indifferent, and, as I had a more promising field elsewhere, I stayed in the town only a few days. But presently the county papers began to be full of the library business, and I was asked to speak here and there in the little schoolhouses and churches. At first I trembled at facing an audience of one or two hundred, but I had not been a schoolma’am for nothing, and I soon got over that, at last finding myself no more afraid of them than of my fifty boys and girls in the old school-room at home. I found that this was the best way to arouse interest. I gave them a practical talk, told them about book clubs, Chatauqua circles and other things, and suggested ways and means of raising money. Most of them live pretty comfortably, but money is scarce, and I find that most of the farms are mortgaged. Generally, however, I found some degree of enthusiasm, especially among the women, when they learned that after the first month it could be so arranged that the magazines might be taken from the reading-room and circulated. You can’t imagine how many times I have heard some tired farmer’s wife say, often with tears in her eyes, “Miss Martyn, this’ll be a godsend to me. I never get time to go anywhere, or to sit down and read a book; but if I could have that ‘St. Nicholas’ or ‘Wide Awake’ for the children, or just sit down once in a while and read an article, or simply look at those beautiful pictures in ‘Harper’s’ and ‘The Century,’ I feel as though I shouldn’t get so discouraged with the work.” “Sometimes I feel as if I was forgetting all I ever knew, and the children are growing up so rough and don’t know about any other kind of life,” they will say, in a troubled way, and I feel sorry enough for them. In many cases these women before coming west have had good educations, and this monotonous life, in which there is so little mental stimulus, is terribly hard for them to bear.