Little by little he grew to wait on the children as a matter of course. He was even allowed to keep the novels desired by the Meadows child in the juvenile shelf, where he insisted they belonged. "Only the girls in Number Seven want 'em," he explained, when his superior complained of his audacity in removing them from adult fiction. And so the little girl who had reached that period of little girlhood when every well-regulated young person is compelled by some inward power to ask the librarian, tremblingly, if she has a book in the libr'y called _St. Elmo_, was spared all embarrassment, for Jimmy handed it out to her almost before she asked. Not that he lacked the discrimination to exercise a proper authority on occasion. Miss Watkins remembered long a surprising scene which she witnessed from the top of a ladder in the Biography and Letters Section. A shambling, unwholesome boy had asked Miss Mather in a husky voice for the works of Edgar A. Poe, and as she blew off the dust from the top and extended two fat volumes toward him, a rapid tapping heralded the youngest official. "Don't you give 'em to him, don't you!" he cried, warningly. As she paused instinctively he shook his finger with a quaint, old-fashioned gesture at the boy. "You ought to be ashamed, Sam Wheeler," he said reprovingly. "You shan't take those books a step. Not a step. If you think you're going to scare Susy to death you're mistaken. If you want to read 'em, come here and do it. But you aren't a-going to read 'em to her nights, again. So you go right off, now!" Without a word Sam turned and left the library, and Miss Watkins from her ladder remonstrated feebly. "Why, Jimmy, if that boy has a ticket you haven't any right----" "Do you know what he does with those books, Miss Watkins?" replied the dauntless squire of dames. "He reads 'em after supper to his little sister Susy. That one where the house all falls down and the one where the lady's teeth come out and she carries 'em in her hand! And she don't dare take her feet off the rungs, she sits so still. And she don't go to sleep hardly ever. Do you s'pose I'd let him take 'em?" The librarian threshed the matter over, and finally thought to stagger him by the suggestion that it would be difficult for him to ascertain the precise intention of everyone drawing out books. "How do you know," she asked, "that other people may not be frightening each other with various stories?" "There aren't many fellows as mean as Sam Wheeler," he replied promptly, "and then I was sure that he was going to. I happened to know." She turned again to her work and he went back to his corner, the brown book under his arm.