Page 193 - The Story of My Lif

friends said they would help me, and they formed a club, the object of which is

to work for the establishment of a free public library in Tuscumbia.

They have now about 100 books and about $55 in money, and a kind gentleman
has given us land on which to erect a library building.

But in the meantime the club has rented a little room in a central part of the
town, and the books which we already have are free to all. 3. Only a few of my
kind friends in Boston know anything about the library. I did not like to trouble

them while I was trying to get money for poor little Tommy, for of course it was
more important that he should be educated than that my people should have
books to read. 4. I do not know what books we have, but I think it is a
miscellaneous (I think that is the word) collection….

P.S. My teacher thinks it would be more businesslike to say that a list of the

contributors toward the building fund will be kept and published in my father’s
paper, the “North Alabamian.”

H. K.

TO MISS CAROLINE DERBY

Hulton, Penn., December 28, 1893.

…Please thank dear Miss Derby for me for the pretty shield which she sent me.
It is a very interesting souvenir of Columbus, and of the Fair White City; but I
cannot imagine what discoveries I have made,—I mean new discoveries. We are
all discoverers in one sense, being born quite ignorant of all things; but I hardly
think that is what she meant. Tell her she must explain why I am a discoverer….

TO DR. EDWARD EVERETT HALE

Hulton, Pennsylvania, January 14, [1894].