Speak low, tread softly through these halls;
Here Genius lives enshrined!
Here live, in silent majesty,
The monarchs of the mind!
A mighty spirit-host they come
From every age and clime;
Above the buried wrecks of years
They breast the tide of Time,
And in their presence-chamber here
They hold their regal state,
And round them throng a noble train,
The gifted and the great.

One of the most wonderful things in our modern civilization, did we but stop to realize it, is the English alphabet. Here are twenty-six little characters which, when set down in their regular order even, look to the illiterate man like a hopeless jumble of signs. Yet among the first things taught a child when it enters school are the twenty-six names of these respective signs, for we have come to regard illiteracy as a disgrace next door to a crime. Having learned the names of these little twisted characters—and what a task some of us found it!—he is next taught to string them into monosyllables, and so on until he finds that any word may be formed from them if they are properly arranged. He has learned to read and if he shows a liking for his new accomplishment and a desire to cultivate it, a boundless vista begins to open up to his vision. It is through the medium of these innocent looking little signs we express to one another the boundless thoughts of the universe, and some of these thoughts begin to interest the young reader. He learns something of the triumphs of that language we are so proud to call our own, a language that has spread to the uttermost corners of the earth, and that in force, in richness, in aptitude for all the highest purposes to which the poet, the philosopher and the orator have put it, is inferior to the Grecian language alone, if not its equal. He begins to taste of that noble literature which Macauley well declared to be “the most splendid and the most durable of the many glories of England.”

Sir John Herschel says in one of his essays, in speaking of a taste for reading: “Give a man this taste and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail in making a happy man, unless, indeed, you put into his hands it most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history— with the wisest, the wittiest — with the tenderest, the bravest and the purest characters that have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations—a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him. It is morally impossible but that the maimers should take a tinge of good breeding and civilization from having constantly before one's eyes the way in which the best bred and best informed have talked and conducted themselves in their intercourse with one another.”

In 1850 a library association was organized on the Lake Shore Line, and, about eight years later, another was formed in the school district of Leith. Long years afterwards it was our fortune to peruse a list of the consents of both these libraries, and the impression that had been for years growing upon us was by this means confirmed, viz., that North Sydenham must have been settled by a superior class of men insofar as intellect was concerned. Speaking in a general sense, men and communities may safely be judged by the character of their recreations and enjoyments. An idle, worthless man seldom enjoys solid, substantial reading, which is itself the result of great labor and long-continued effort. Even where he is capable of its appreciation, it is a mute reproach to his own idle worthlessness. Thoughtful and earnest minded men are not content, on the other hand, with the froth and scum of literature, and this was the case with the men who settled in the Leith and Annan districts. On Sundays they demanded the strong meat of the Word in the sermons they listened to, and on week-days their souls demanded the equally strong nourishment of a substantial literature.

This circumstance need not be wondered at. This whole section of the township was practically a part of the Scottish Lowlands, cut out and transplanted in Canada. Many of these men had received the best education afforded by the common schools in the land they came from; not a few of them had attended the high schools in Edinburgh, Dumfries and Ayr. They had a genuine passion for the acquisition of knowledge.

When the Annan library was first organized, Mr. Gideon Harkness kindly offered part of his residence as the library room and his estimable wife was chosen the first librarian. There is no record of what the entrance fee amounted to, but in the prevailing scarcity of money it must have been small. Mrs. Harkness had herself a refined taste in literature, which ran largely to biographical works. A great writer has declared that history is only biography transformed, a biography of the lives of great men. Gibbon, himself a great historian, declares on the other hand that history “is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes ,follies and misfortunes of mankind.” So “you pays your money and you takes your choice.” Mrs. Harkness continued as librarian for one year when the office and the library were transferred to William Telford, sr. One of the reasons assigned for the change was that Mr. Harkness, who loved animals of every kind, kept a big black dog of a most ferocious countenance that was of itself enough to appal the stoutest heart.

The books steadily accumulated. Many of the contributors, lacking ready money, paid their fees in books brought from Scotland. Among these were Henry Baker, who gave several bound volumes of the Spectator; George Nesbit, whose contribution was “Handy Andy,” a favorite of the time; Hugh Reid, who gave a History of the Disruption of 1843, a volume dear to the heart of every adherent of the Free Kirk; John Telfer, a number of assorted books, and Francis Burford, a scion of an old family of ancient and honorable lineage, the books presented by whom all bore the crest and coat of arms ofthe Burford family. Later Mr. Baker contributed two volumes of Juvenal's Satires.

A partial list of books that were bought from the funds follows, as furnished from the memory of a member of the library still living. The list is incomplete, of course, but it will give some idea of the intellectual tastes of those who made undreamed of sacrifices in order to obtain them. It included Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; the Encyclopedia of English Literature, in two volumes; Livingstone’s Travels in South Africa; Diary of a late Physician, two volumes; Harper’s Magazine, six volumes; David Hume’s History of England; D’Aubighney’s History of the Reformation; four volumes of Hugh Millar’s Geological Works; Buckland’s Geology, or the Bridgewater Treatise; three volumes of the Edinburgh Magazine; the Quarterly and Blackwood’s Magazines; Life of Dr. Chalmers; Dr. Chalmers’ Astronomical Discourses; Spurgeon’s Sermons; Chambers’ Information for the People; Chambers’ Miscellaney; Butler’s Analogy; Josephus’ Works; Pilgrim’s Progress; Maurice’s Geography of the Sea; Macauley’s History of England and Boswell’s Life of Johntsone, in five volumes.

In fiction there were Wilson’s “Tales of the Scottish Border,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” several of the Waverley novels of course, Hogg’s “Winter Evening Tales,” Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” and a few others. That department, however, was a small one and totally unlike the fiction section in our modern libraries, which overshadows everything else. Of the poets there was a goodly array, Burns, Byron, Moore, Goldsmith and Scott being the favorites.

These books and others like them were not bought for show, or for an empty display of learning. They were read—many of them by the same people over and over again. The money which bought them was so scarce and hard earned that each book was a treasure in itself. It must be remembered that the men and women who read them did so by the light of tallow candles, and in their first log houses. It must have been disconcerting to the stranger to find such men discoursing familiarly upon the contents of the Wealth of Nations, or Butler’s Analogy. The modern fiction fiend who steps into a stationery store on the day they are first placed on sale and buys the latest novel by Sabatini, Conrad or Edith Wharton, takes it home and devours it at one sitting, with about as much mental nourishment as he would derive from the perusal of a department store catalogue, cannot conceive what these books of the most substantial information meant to the patrons of the Lake Shore Line library.

There were pedants among them of course. One old lady professed to have read all the serious literature worth reading—rather a wide claim. Some had the temerity not to believe it.

“Have you read a book called ‘The Horror of Horrors’ Mrs. L-?” enquired one of her neighbors, while in conversation with this lady of learning.

“Why, yes,” she replied, “a score of times.”

“You’re a liar—there is no such book!” retorted the neighbor.

One of the books that made a great sensation when it was first published about this time was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It is almost or quite impossible for present day readers to realize the bitterness of the struggle then being waged in the neighboring republic over the slavery issue. Everything was subordinated to it. The South was supreme in Congress, and the slave owners had many defenders in the North who believed what they said, that slavery was a God-ordained institution. This seems a preposterous position to us now, but the majority of Americans at that time believed it. Maybe they believed it because the rise of cotton growing had made slavery profitable. The struggle for supremacy between the two factions in Kansas and Nebraska, the John Brown insurrection of the late fifties at Harper’s Ferry, and a hundred other historic incidents, most of them marked by violence, all culminated in the election of Lincoln in the fall of 1860, when the South, seeing herself hopelessly beaten in Congress, drew the sword, threw away the scabbard and appealed to the God of Battles.

Those were stirring days, even in Canada. It surprises us now to learn that the general conviction in Sydenham was, in the first two and one half years of the conflict at least, that the South was sure to win. Our hindsight is always better than our foresight; we are all wise after the event.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was the piece de resistance of anti-slavery literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe was called to the White House by Lincoln and thanked for writing it. On the Lake Shore Line the book was read on the instalment system. When work was done and supper eaten one member of the family took it for a half hour or an hour, according to the time agreed upon. Then it was handed over to another member who read for the same length of time, while the others impatiently watched the clock, and so on. It was a topic of conversation for weeks after all had finished it.

Some years later—the exact date has been forgotten —a temperance society was organized, public sentiment having changed since the Reverend Mr. MacKinnon’s time, and this institution also supported a library for its members. A lodge of the British-American Good Templars was about this time organized in the school district at Leith and its library, part of which is still in evidence, was also a good one. The two libraries at Annan were united after the church was built in 1882, and as the temperance society met in its basement the new combination found a home there also. Another generation has arisen, the library has long since lost its patrons, and the books are scattered or have been destroyed. Some have been preserved by the old people as souvenirs of something in which they once found a solace and quiet enjoyment. The younger people find no pleasure in them and probably would esteem the time spent in reading them as wasted.

When young, indeed,
In full content we sometimes nobly rest,
Unanxious for ourselves, and only wish
As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise.

Our young people, when they read at all, are more interested in the flood of fiction that year after year pours in hundreds of tons from the presses of the big publishing houses, here and in the United States. Whiskey may poison the body, but as a mind poisoner our modern novel, with its eternal hogwash of sex, stands without a rival. It paints nothing as it is and everything as it is not. It gives the reader a false, unnatural and distorted view of life as it really is, but this is all done for a purpose. As a late writer has well said of it: “The pabulum of the modern novel in its various dressings is mostly provided by the anomalies and futilities of a society of inequality wielded by a false sense of duty, which produces the necessary imbroglio wherewith to embarrass the hero and heroine through the due number of pages.” There are notable exceptions to all the foregoing among our fiction writers and our young people who have a taste for reading, but in the vast majority of cases it is true. Our taste in literature has by such an influence become a depraved and vitiated one. Some of the energy displayed by our excellent friends, the prohibitionists, might be better employed in combatting this subtle and insidious evil.

Many of these patrons of the Lake Shore Line and Leith libraries, well read and well informed as they were, made curious miscalculations and mistakes. In 1857 the first attempts were made at laying an Atlantic cable. The mails were being brought by boat from Owen Sound to Leith twice a week, on Tuesday and Saturdays, at that time. In due time they brought the news of this daring experiment to the village, and one day a solemn conclave of farmers and villagers discussed the tidings pro and con, and the chances of its success. At the conclusion of the discussion, when all had ventured their opinions, it was unanimously decided that the whole idea was the hallucination of a disordered intellect and that the promoters of the enterprise should be locked up in an asylum as madmen. We have this story from one who was present at the meeting ,which was an informal one and held in the post office. However, about a year later, or in August, 1858, to be precise, came the word that the great experiment had succeeded and that a text of Scripture, “Glory to God in the highest, on earth, peace, goodwill to men” had been flashed along the bed of the Atlantic as England’s first greeting to America over the wire. The message on its original telegraphic tape is still preserved in the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, and is one of the most wonderful sights in that theatre of wonders, when one stops to reflect upon what its production meant. It will be remembered that after a few weeks’ operation the cable was mysteriously stricken silent. But it had been proved that man had triumphed over the forces of nature once more; a new one was soon in operation, the wise men of Leith were given a lesson in experience—and we seem to be as far as ever from peace on earth.

For the library at Leith the entrance fee was fixed at fifty cents and the dues at twenty-five cents a year. Allan Ross was its first librarian and secretary-treasurer and held these offices about twelve years. It boasted almost all the books found in the Annan library, a complete set of Shakespeare’s work’s, Scott’s Life of Napoleon, Homer’s Iliad, Dick’s complete works, Dwight’s Theology and many other works of the same standard. The world’s store of accumulated knowledge was small in that day when compared with ours, when men specialize in one branch of it and even then hope to master only a small part of that branch. But the patrons of these libraries were evidently determined to absorb all they could of the store of knowledge then available. A portion of this latter library, which long ago ceased to circulate, still is found on the old shelves, but with the volumes are mixed a lot of school boy stories that seem sadly incongruous in such company.

In many respects we live in a vastly better world than that of sixty and seventy years ago, but in the quality of our daily reading it is to be doubted if we have made any advancement over the people of that time. The evidence seems to point the other way.