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to return to school. I never saw him again nor, I regret to say, did I make any effort to seek him out. What unconscious cruelty we practise as children!
    Although the eccentricities of some of my pals did not perturb Helen, whose tolerance seemed almost limitless, she did worry that I was, in the words of her younger brother Arthur (who was only six years my senior), such a “skinny little wart.” Certainly my appearance was not prepossessing. At the age of five I weighed only about thirty pounds, had arms and legs that made match sticks seem robust, and balanced a pumpkin head on a neck as graceful and nearly as thin as that of a stork. Kindly people said I looked delicate or frail. Less kindly ones described me as peaked or puny. Heartless ones stigmatized me as a sickly runt—though sickly I was not.
    None of this bothered me in those early days but it did distress my mother. She pestered old Dr. Farncombe for tonics, potions, and procedures which would turn me into a young porker. By the time I was entering my sixth year, he grew tired of her importunities and made an appointment for me to be examined in Toronto by Dr. Alan Brown, Canada’s foremost pediatrician.
    We took the train up from Trenton on a Friday morning and then a streetcar to his office, which was all very hoity-toity, with many nurses in starched uniforms running about. There must have been a dozen mothers with their children, all waiting to see the Great Man, and we joined them. After a very long time, a nurse came and took me into the inner sanctum where I was stripped to the buff and poked and pinched until I was ready to make a bolt for it. I was gone such a long time that Helen had almost given up hope for me. At last Dr. Brown himself brought me back into the waiting room.
    â€œWho’s Mrs. Mowat?” he cried.
    My mother timidly responded, whereupon he shouted in a voice I’m sure could have been heard all over the building:
    â€œWell, Madam, what do you mean wasting my time? This boy is as healthy as an ox. As for his size—if you’d wanted a prize fighter for a son you should have married one. Good day to you!”
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    ANGUS WAS POSSESSED OF FURIOUS energy, with ambition to match, neither of which had ever been fully unleashed until he was hired to rejuvenate Trenton’s library. Thereafter he dedicated himself to becoming the ideal librarian. He sent for and devoured everything available about what would later become known as library science. He swept through the library stacks like a cyclone, ruthlessly discarding the accumulated literary dead wood of generations. Bit by bit, for money was scarce, he then refilled the shelves with books people would take home and read. Circulation doubled, then tripled. And word got around.
    In the summer of 1928 he was invited to take charge of the Corby Public Library in neighbouring Belleville, and he accepted. Belleville was the county seat and considerably larger and richer than Trenton. So was its library, which even rated a part-time assistant. Apart from the greater prestige which the move brought him, Angus’s salary nearly tripled. We now had our feet firmly planted on the ladder to middle-class success.
    The library building, which had originally housed the Merchants Bank, was an austere, three-storeyed limestone monument standing on the terraced slope of a hill overlooking the Moira River. A high retaining wall behind the building was full of nooks and crannies which delighted me by providing a lodging house for innumerable birds, mice, squirrels, and snakes.
    We lived in a high-ceilinged, wide-windowed apartment occupying most of the second floor, which had once housed the bank manager and his family. These were by far the most spacious quarters we had yet known and our scanty collection of hand-me-down furniture did little to dispel the illusion of camping in an abandoned automobile showroom. However, the vast interior