to the uninitiated, since they are furnished with little but a few tables or benches for packing books on and enough shelving to hold a fraction of the working stock of books, most of which are out in the villages and when they come home are off on another journey almost at once. A few stout boxes, with simple fittings countersunk to avoid damage in transit, lie about, full or empty. These are sent out, each carrying fifty or a hundred volumes, by rail, carrier, or motor-van, to the village schools or perchance the village club, to be handed to the readers by volunteer librarians, who are in most cases the schoolmasters. In a typical county, where the population is mainly rural and the repository is quartered in a borough of moderate size without a library of its own--where indeed the local inhabitants, hungering for books which their own borough council will not consent to provide, have to be kept at arm’s length by warning notices--some three hundred villages are each at present receiving about two hundred and fifty books a year. It is not much; it is not much more than an experiment; but anyhow it is a beginning; and, remember, until the rural scheme arrived the labouring man never saw a new book, from year end to year end, unless his child won a Sunday School prize. The circulating stock consists of books for children and the class of books commonly defined as for the general reader--that is to say, works for entertainment primarily and in the second place for knowledge or information. Further, there is in this particular centre a strong collection of educational works for the use of teachers, and a numerous and sound selection of sociological literature for the special benefit of the Workers’ Educational Association, who have many tutorial classes in the district, most of them studying economics, social philosophy, or the science of politics. The teachers are allowed to borrow several books at a time, to further their work; and in addition, the requirements of modern methods in teaching reading are met by the allowance of perhaps fifteen or two dozen copies of certain select books, to enable every child in a class to have a copy--the reading-circle system applied in the school. If any studious person should ask for a book not in the printed catalogue, a book obviously in advance of the general demand and costing rather more than the average price bargained for, the librarian sends for it to the Central Library for Students, in Tavistock Square, London. Even the newest and least-developed rural library aims at an ideal that the great commercial circulating libraries have given up as unattainable, to enable any reader to have access to any book, of unquestioned value, that he applies for--and few failures to achieve this end, by one means or another, have to be reported.