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Updated: June 17, 2025
Last Saturday, Dolly Graham up in the Circulation was telling me, an old colored mammy said she'd lost her mittens in the reading-room; and the first they knew Dolly was hunting through the Woollen Goods classification, and Mary Gayley pawing the dictionary wildly for m-i-t!" "And they found the mittens hung around her neck by the cord," finished the Liberry Teacher.
So the Liberry Teacher braced herself severely, and put on her reading-glasses with a view to looking older and more firm. "Liberry Teacher," it might be well to explain, was not her official title. Her description on the pay-roll ran "Assistant for the Children's Department, Greenway Branch, City Public Library." Grown-up people, when she happened to run across them, called her Miss Braithwaite.
Flossie and Freddie rode in the back part of the overturned chair, and Laddie sat in front of them and made believe he was a chauffeur of a taxicab, running about the streets of New York. As Laddie knew the names of many places where the real taxicabs stop, he could call them out from time to time. "Oh, I'm going to stop off at the Public Liberry!" called out Flossie, while the play was going on.
And it must be worse and more of it now, because in the interval between two and four there had been many little sticky fingers pulling at her sleeves and skirt, and you just have to cuddle dear little library children, even when they're not extra clean; and when Vera Aronsohn burst into heartbroken tears on the Liberry Teacher's blue woolen shoulder because her pet fairy-book was missing, she had caught several strands of the Teacher's yellow hair in her anguish, much to the hair's detriment.
The Liberry Teacher knew that it was her duty to go over and hypnotize the child into reading something which would lead more directly to Browning and Strindberg. But she didn't. "Poor little wop!" she thought unacademically. "Let her be happy in her own way!" And the Liberry Teacher herself went on being unhappy in her own way. "I'm just a battered bisque doll!" she repeated to herself bitterly.
But at four o'clock of a wet Saturday afternoon, in a badly ventilated, badly lighted room full of damp little unwashed foreign children, even the most sunny-hearted Liberry Teacher may be excused for having thoughts that are a little tired and cross and restless. The Liberry Teacher had stopped, for five minutes, being grown-up and responsible, and she was wishing wishing hard and vengefully.
Well, so thishere young li'l Dills settin' there puffin' an' blowin' his ches' out and in, an' feelin' all nice 'cause it about the firs' time this livin' summer he catch you' Aunt Julia alone to hisse'f fer while an' all time the house dess fillin' up, an' draf' blowin' straight at you' grampaw whur he settin' in his liberry.
The Liberry Teacher lifted her eyes from a half-made catalogue-card, eyed the relentlessly slow clock and checked a long wriggle of purest, frankest weariness. Then she gave a furtive glance around to see if the children had noticed she was off guard; for if they had she knew the whole crowd might take more liberties than they ought to, and have to be spoken to by the janitor.
"Wouldn't I be a hireling too if if I had anything to do with it?" "No," said Mrs. De Guenther gravely. "You would not. You would have to be his wife." The Liberry Teacher, in her sober best suit, sat down in her entirely commonplace chair in the quiet old parlor, and looked unbelievingly at the sedate elderly couple who had made her this wild proposition. She caught her breath.
I'll bet dat liberry ain' fit fer a pusson to set in!" The laughter which greeted this detracted nothing from her indignation, and she turned again toward the rear premises, shaking her head and mumbling direful things. "That Dale, by the way," the Colonel said at last, "is a curious and remarkable chap. Positively, sir, he gives me a fresh and agreeable surprise each day!"
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