At the platform end we were ready for anything, from itinerant lecturers to the most local preacher, and from hymns to comic songs; the best piano in the area was equal to any strain; and a somewhat portentous rostrum, though not knocked together for me, was just my height, while the American cloth in which we found it was a dead match for our extensive importations of that fabric. It was at this end of the hut that our Special Artist and Decorator had excelled himself. All down the sides were his frieze of flags, his dado of red and white cotton in alternate stripes, and his own extraordinarily effective chalk drawings on sheets of brown paper between the windows. But for the angle under the roof, over the platform, he had reserved his masterpiece. One day, while we were still busy with the books, our handy man of genius had stood for an hour or two on a ladder; and descending, left behind him a complete allegorical cartoon of Literature, including many life-size figures in flowing robes busy with the primitive tools of one's trade. I am not an art critic, like my friend the war correspondent, who ruthlessly detected faults in drawing, instead of applauding all we had to show him; to me, the pride of our walls was at least a remarkable _tour de force_. The Official Photographer was to have come at a later date to witness if I exaggerate. He left it too long. He may have another chance this winter. 'Literature' has been preserved.
These private views too often started at the counter, because visitors had a way of entering through my room; but to see the library as I do think it deserved seeing, one had to turn one's back upon all I have described, and with a proper piety bear down upon the books. In their five long shelves, each edged and backed with the warm red cotton of the dado, and broken only by my door behind the counter, those thirty yards of good and bad reading were wholly good to see, on our opening day especially, before the first borrower had made the first gap in their serried ranks. There indeed stood they at attention, their labels at the same unwavering height as so many pairs of puttees (except the few I had not affixed myself); and I felt that I, too, had turned a mob into an army.