Other working departments of the library (not open to the public) include the Librarian's Room, on the main floor; the Trustees' Room above, with panelled doors, wainscot, and ceiling from an old chateau in France; the Ordering, Correspondence, and Binding Rooms; and, finally, the cellars, fitted up with the machinery for light, heat, and ventilation. The mechanism of the latter is especially interesting. A huge electric fan keeps the current in active motion, and all the air so introduced is filtered through long shafts of sackcloth before distribution, after which it is withdrawn by means of a corresponding fan directly under the roof. Visiting in turn these arcana of the building, one is speedily convinced that no modern contrivance tending to insure comfort has been overlooked.

Comfort, as all must allow, is eminently desirable; but the critic may question the need of so rare a setting for it. Why, he may ask, would not a simpler reading-room serve the rank and file of the public as well as the arched grandeur of Bates Hall? Why ransack the quarries of Carrara for costly marbles? Why employ famous hands to paint the intermediate wall-surface? To all such shallow criticism there can be but one emphatic answer. The builders have dedicated this great library to the advancement of learning, in due remembrance of the fact that familiarity with things ideally beautiful is an education in itself. With this purpose in view they have dared to build not for a day but for the time to come, and the purpose has been so well achieved that their work takes high rank at once among the few examples of architectural inspiration in America. As time goes on its influence will grow with the growth of the accumulating treasure it contains. Here, at least, is a public library where the eye may share its pleasure with the mind, and our popular taste may gain that impulse in the right direction for which, with us, the opportunity is still far too meagre. We have had no Medici to adorn our streets, and often our public buildings have been the deplorable issue of inexperience and political scheming. Now, for once, we have an enduring monument, worthy of our material prosperity and progress. Turning away, we linger and look back at the long inscription of its northern facade—

and we are profoundly grateful to the commonwealth which has justified itself so nobly that all the world may learn from it a useful lesson.