Then there is a figure I worked out myself a while ago, the library as a social memory. That seems to me capital. I think, so far as I know, I have a copyright on that figure. It was a good address, by the way, in which I used this trope. I wish I had remembered it; I should have brought it along and read it to-night instead of making this carefully set address. Yes, the social memory idea is a good analogy. It reduces the librarian to a medulla oblongata, so far as I am able to understand the psychology of the situation. Yet that is an honorable function, although largely automatic. It is a good thing to control the resources of the social memory, to be able to put these at the service of the public mind--decidedly a fruitful analogy, but I do not care to elaborate it this evening. Another figure is an hydraulic image--the library as a reservoir--a reservoir of the world's refreshing, stimulating, energizing, fructifying influences. The librarian becomes a gate keeper and an irrigator. It is a beautiful thought, that you are letting out these fertilizing floods over the plains of human ignorance and stupidity. No wonder you think well of yourselves. Then there is another that appealed to me this morning--you are a center of radioactivity, of intellectual and moral radioactivity, you are social and psychological physicists. The library as a center of psychic radioactivity strikes me as something satisfying, fascinating, delightful. Another figure has appealed to my imagination. It is the library as an inn of books. Had you thought about that? Of course, you had--and that makes you hotel keepers. You see, being hotel keepers you would naturally be interested in all kinds of equipment; you would have the rooms prepared for your guests in the very best way, you would have a fireproof hotel, the rooms rather narrow, if you please, but plenty large enough and fairly well lighted and ventilated. The trouble is when you are running a big hotel to have the register carefully kept. You know, almost none of our best hotels can ever tell you whether a man is in or out. They are always uncertain about it, and in the old days before libraries and hotels became so efficient you could never be sure the clerk knew his business. You have changed all that, you are the most competent of hotel keepers and know how to build hotels and equip them. You furnish lobbies and parlors in which to meet guests, or if one likes he may take them home with him. I wish I had time to elaborate this idea of the Inn of Books. I am getting fond of it as the imagination plays with it. You can fancy Socrates coming in, looking about cautiously, with a certain apprehension, a little nervous for fear that _she_ might be there. You can imagine him hanging about the corridors, listening to the gentlemen as they talk, coming up behind them, listening a little while, then saying in that calm way of his, that dangerously calm way, "I beg your pardon, but just what do you