A librarian or library assistant can do some of her best work in a Settlement club either in connection with the Settlement library or independently.Readings from Dickens can be illustrated by scenes acted in pantomime,with very simple properties.Indeed,we had not even a curtain when Miss La Creevy painted Kate's miniature,when the Savage and the Maiden danced their inimitable dance,when Mrs.Kenwigs and Morleena held a reception for Mrs.Crummles,the Phenomenon and the ladies of their company,when after they had recited from their star parts,Morleena had the soles of her shoes chalked and danced her fancy dance,and Henrietta Petowker took down her back hair and repeated "The Blooddrinker's Burial."The old man looked over the wall,too,and threw garden vegetables and languishing glances at Mrs.Nickleby who encouraged his advances.There was no time for the girls to learn the parts in the busy,crowded,late-open holiday evenings of department stores,but they all entered into the pantomime and interpreted the reading with spirit,as they did at another time in some of the Shakespeare scenes,Rosalind,Celia and Touchstone,Hamlet and Ophelia,Bottom and Titania,with attendant fairies,and Shylock and Portia.The Dickens scenes were repeated for a younger club,just trying its dramatic wings in charades,and when May-time came these younger girls of twelve to fifteen gave a very successful representation of an old English May-day with Robin Hood and his merry band,a Jester,a Dragon,a Hobby-horse and Jack in the Green,Maid Marian and the Lord and Lady of the May on the library green.
The opportunity of a library in a small town,where there is more leisure than in a city,is in the formation of young people's clubs.One day,a year or two ago,I visited three libraries on the Sound shore in Connecticut.In one,the librarian had made her basement useful out of library hours by organizing a class of chair-caning for boys who were beginning to hang around the streets,and were in danger of being compelled to learn the art in the Reform School if they did not acquire it as a means of keeping their hands from mischief at home.In the next town,the librarian mounted and identified all the moths and butterflies that the children brought to her and gave them insect books.In the library beyond,the children were formed into a branch of the Flower Mission in the nearest city.The club need not always be for reading,but must depend on the resources or interests of the boys and girls.There is no need of debating clubs in our library,for the city is full of them,but they may be the very best thing that the librarian in the next town can form.
A reading club must not necessarily be a club for the study or enjoyment of stories,history or poetry.Under the guidance of the kind of librarian who aims far above her audience,it may turn into something like Mr.Wopsle's quarterly examinations of his great aunt's school,"when what he did,"says Pip,"was to turn up his cuffs,stick up his hair and give us Mark Antony's oration over the body of Caesar.This was always followed by Collins's Ode on the Passions,wherein I particularly venerated Mr.Wopsle as Revenge,throwing his bloodstained sword in thunder down,and taking the war-renouncing trumpet with a withering look."There may be a club for making things out of the Beard books,for the study of sleight-of-hand,for exchanging postcards with children in other countries and reading about the places on them.It may make historical pilgrimages to places of interest in the town or may collect stones and clay nodules,and read about them.The important thing is to find children of nearly the same age and neighborhood with interests in common,and let them decide whom they shall ask to join the club after it is formed.Better yet if they ask for the club in the first place.One not very long-lived Settlement club which I knew was of boys who wished to read and act Shakespeare,but a very few evenings convinced them that as they could not even read the lines without stumbling,they were not on the road to the actors'
Temple of Fame.They were boys who had left school at fourteen in the lower grades,except one,who had taken his High School examinations and is now at the head of a department in a large department store and a prominent member of a political study club.The others,who had expected to play prominent Shakespearean parts with little or no work,were easily discouraged,dropped off and were seen no more.The reading of very simple plays at first is a good stepping-stone to a study of Shakespeare later,but the plays must be interesting enough to hold the attention of boys who do not read fluently.
