Their house proved to be the near-by farm. One of the best in that section, it was heated with steam and furnished with running water and plumbing. It had also a local and long-distance telephone. The brother and sister were but two of a family of seven children. Their father, who was a member of the school committee, and their mother, who was a graduate of a city high school, were keenly interested in, and, moreover, very well informed on, the subject of pedagogy. They had read a great number of books relating to it, and were in the habit of following in the newspapers the procedures of the National Education Association's Conventions. "Your children have a large number of exceedingly good books!" I exclaimed, as I looked at the many volumes on a day appointed for that purpose by the mother of the family. "I wish all children had as fine a collection!" "Country children _must_ have books," she replied, "if they are going to be educated _at all._ City children can _see_ things, and learn about them that way. Country children have to read about them if they are to know about them." The books were of many types--poetry, fiction, historical stories, nature study, and several volumes of the "how to make" variety. All of these were of the best of their several kinds--identical with the books found in the "Children's Room" in any well-selected public library. Some of them had been gifts to the children from "summer boarders," but the majority had been chosen and purchased by their parents. "We hunt up the names of good books for children in the book review departments of the magazines," the mother said. When I asked what magazines, she mentioned three. Two she and her husband "took"; the other she borrowed monthly from a neighbor, on an "exchange" basis. No other children in that region were so abundantly supplied with books; but all whom I met liked to read. Their parents, in most cases unable to give them numerous books, had, in almost every instance, taught them to love reading. One boy with whom I became friends had a birthday while I was in the neighborhood. I had heard him express a longing to read "The Lays of Ancient Rome," which neither he nor any other child in the vicinity possessed, so I presented him with a copy of it. "Would you mind if I gave it to the library?" he asked. "Then the other children around could read it, too." "The library!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I don't mean the one down in the village," he hastened to explain. "I mean the one here, near us. Haven't you been to it?" When he found that I had not, he offered to go with me to see it. It turned out to be a "lean-to" in a farmhouse that was in a rather central position with relation to the surrounding farms. The library consisted of about two hundred volumes. The librarian was an elderly woman who lived in the house. One was allowed, she told me, to take out as many books as one wished, and to keep them until one had finished reading them.