206 THE LIBRARY 



evaporate in the process of transfer enough remains for pleasure and 

 inspiration. There is an illustration of this in the pathetic reference 

 to Raphael's Madonna Delia Seggiola in Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford. 1 

 A soldier's wife in India, whose previous children have died, tramps 

 with her baby to secure a passage to England that the child may 

 have a chance to live. She tells her story: 



" And when Phoebe was coming, I said to my husband, ' Sam, 

 when the child is born, and I am strong, I shall leave you; it will 

 cut my heart cruel; but if this baby dies too, I shall go mad; the 

 madness is in me now; but if you let me go to Calcutta, carrying my 

 baby step by step, it will, maybe, work itself off; and I will save, 

 and I will hoard, and I will beg and I will die, to get a passage 

 home to England, where our baby may live.' God bless him! he 

 said I might go; and he saved up his pay, and I saved every pice 

 I could get for washing or any way; and when Phrebe came, and I 

 grew strong again, I set off. It was very lonely; through the thick 

 forests, dark again with their heavy trees along by the river's 

 side (but I had been brought up near the Avon in Warwickshire, 

 so that flowing noise sounded like home) from station to station, 

 from Indian village to village, I went along, carrying my child. I had 

 seen one of the officers' ladies with a little picture, ma'am, done by 

 a Catholic foreigner, ma'am, of the Virgin and the little Saviour, 

 ma'am. She had him on her arm, and her form was softly curled 

 round him, and their cheeks touched. Well, when I went to bid 

 good-bye to this lady, for whom I had washed, she cried sadly; for 

 she, too, had lost her children, but she had not another to save, 

 like me; and I was bold enough to ask her, would she give me that 

 print. And she cried the more, and said her children were with that 

 little blessed Jesus; and gave it me, and told me she had heard it had 

 been painted on the bottom of a cask, which made it have that round 

 shape. And when my body was very weary, and my heart was sick 

 (for there were times when I misdoubted if I could ever reach my 

 home, and there were times when I thought of my husband, and one 

 time when I thought my baby was dying), I took out that picture 

 and looked at it, till I could have thought the mother spoke to me, 

 and comforted me." 



The library should garner all that shows the development of the 

 religious spirit. No manifestation of man's reaching out to the 

 infinite, however ineffectual or however sordid, is to be despised. 

 " Where others have prayed before to their God in their joy or in 

 their agony is of itself a sacred place." The speculations of philoso- 

 phers as to the contents and methods of the human mind, its powers 

 and its limitations, should find a place in the library. Nor should 

 the song of the poet or the fiction of the story-teller be excluded. 



1 Gaskell's Cranford, chap. xi. 2 Ibid. 



