 Chapter 9. It is natural to suppose that any reader of current English literature would know Miss Wilkins. Yet it is the much admired author herself who tells this story of her introduction to a popular contemporary. It was before Mr. Crawford had publicly appeared as a reader, and just after he had read to a select coterie of Brooklyn people at the house of a well-known lady. A reception followed, and when I was introduced the hostess said, Mr. Crawford, I wish to introduce Miss Wilkins. Mr. Crawford gave me a coldly polite bow, and I would have passed on perfectly satisfied, but not so my hostess. She felt that Mr. Crawford ought to have recognized in me a fellow author, and she quickly followed the first introduction with an impressive, Mr. Crawford, this is Miss Mary E. Wilkins. Again the delightful novelist gave me a polite bow of recognition. My friend was sorely distressed. Not even now did the lion of the evening dame to recognize this poor little body. But my friend would not be repulsed. So she returned afresh to the assault, and in a still more impressive manner she said, but Mr. Crawford, this is Miss Mary E. Wilkins, the author of those charming stories of New England's life. Mr. Crawford, I felt quite sure, had never heard of poor me. I did not wonder at it. Why should he, living so far away and naturally enough absorbed in his own work, he probably had never seen a line I had written. But he was equal to the occasion, and if he did simulate I could forgive him, for he was very polite. He bowed and smiled most graciously, and shaking me by the hand he expressed great pleasure at meeting me. How I have laughed over this incident. It may not seem funny to hear me related, but the time, the place, and his bewildered manner as he tried to make me believe he knew all about me was most delicious comedy. The majority of the members of the reading public, either in this country or in England, would feel no need to simulate a knowledge of the author of Pembroke. Mr. Crawford is an extraordinarily busy man, and he has been graciously forgiven. But we may well be asked to believe that the hostess of that occasion was astonished. Miss Wilkins has had an admiring audience for the last eighteen years. It was early in the eighties that she first tried her pen seriously. She wrote a short story called The Ghost Family for the Boston Budget, a weekly survival of the days of Boston's literary renown, and the story won a prize of fifty dollars. We might go back further than the eighties, but the fact that she wrote poetry at the age of twelve is conventional. What bright child does not write poetry? We shall rely on an old friend of Miss Wilkins, Mrs. Kate Upps and Clark, for a few details. Her first literary attempts were almost entirely for children, but at the urgent solicitation of friends, she soon began to take up a deeper kind of work, and sent her first story for older readers to Miss Mary L. Booth, then editor of Harper's Bazaar. Miss Booth thought that such cramped and unformed handwriting promised little, and that she was the victim of some ambitions but unavailable child. With her usual conscientiousness, however, she looked the little piece carefully over. It was Miss Booth's habit when attracted by a story to read it through three times on different days and in different moods, before accepting it. She paid this compliment to two old lovers, the contribution which Miss Wilkins had submitted to her. Two days later the ambitious child received a handsome check for it. From this time forth, Miss Booth befriended the young writer in every way, and Miss Wilkins, who was almost morbidly appreciative of kindness, and as true to her friends as one of her own inflexible New England characters, rewarded Miss Booth's thoughtfulness by giving to her as long as she lived the first choice of her stories. The date of the appearance of two old lovers in Harper's Bazaar is March 31, 1883. But the tale of the sketch is moving faster than the head. The author of two old lovers was born in Randolph, Massachusetts in 1862. Her father, a native of Salem, was a descendant of a conspicuous Puritan, Bray Wilkins. Her mother was a wholebrook of wholebrook, an old established family of Massachusetts country folk. Mr. Wilkins was a carpenter of ancient style. That is to say, he was both designer and builder. When Mary was a little girl, however, he gave up his profession to keep store in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the town where restless Mr. Kipling alighted for a while. The daughter of the Randolph carpenter passed her girlhood. Mr. J. E. Chamberlain, who collaborated with her in the writing of The Long Arm, the $2,000 newspaper prize detective story, remarks, So far as local influences have affected her work, I fancy that those of Southern Vermont have preponderated. Mr. Chamberlain also is the authority for the statement that, her creations are mainly drawn purely out of her imagination, and squared to nature and reality by the exercise of a keen and omnivorous faculty of observation which has grown instinctive and is as unconscious as it is accurate, like the minutely true eye measurements with which the Japanese carpenters astonished us at the world's fair. And for her nature settings and decoration she depends rather on the sharp recollections of childhood than on more recent observations. She never had a bit of the spirit of the naturalist. All the same there are glimpses of Randolph, of the Randolph of her childhood, in some of Ms. Wilkins' stories. We read in Jerome, three fields to the northward from the Edward's house was a great rock ledge. On the southern side of it was a famous hiding place for a boy on a windy spring day. There was a hollow in the rock for a space as tall as Jerome, and the ledge extended itself out beyond it like a sheltering granite wing to the westward. At the side of the gentle hill, at the left a pile of blooming peach trees looked as if they were moving down the slope to some imperious march music of the spring. That spot is in Randolph, within sight of the weather-beaten two-story house in which the author was born. But Ms. Wilkins is careful not to offend the townspeople by portraying the living. She has portrayed the dead, however. Barnabas in Pembroke was a Randolph character, as a rule she draws from her imagination, as Mr. Chamberlain says. In the ten years that Ms. Wilkins lived in Brattleboro she experienced a world of sorrow. Her father died, and her mother, and her sister. Burdened with her grief, Mary returned to Randolph, and there with friends in a typical country house standing about half a mile from her birthplace, she has since lived, where she will live the rest of her life, rest largely with Dr. Charles Manning Freeman of Matuchan, New Jersey. The author chooses to be distant to all but her dear friends, or rather, she has a shrinking nature like the sensitive plant. The ancient kitchen, which is Ms. Wilkins' sitting-room, is not also her riding-room, though it is nicely retired and out of the noise of the exceedingly quiet household in which she has her home. It's window commands a view of nothing but the side of the adjoining house, which affords but slight inspiration. She writes upstairs in a room that looks off eastwardly over the street with its electric cars, and to the low coast hills and woods in the distance. Before she became addicted to the typewriter, which was only a few years ago, she was accustomed, when in the mood for work, to produce a thousand words a day in what she once herself described as an unformed and childish style of handwriting. Today her pages are as prim as a professional secretaries. We have a page before us, and at the bottom of it is the decrepit signature. It gives character to the page, however, and what would not many an autograph hunter give for it. Now and then, when at the height of her fervor, Ms. Wilkins will write three or four thousand words a day, and now and then a week will pass without winning a line from her. Environment affects her strongly, says Mrs. Clark. She finds it difficult, sometimes impossible, to compose anything when away from home. She is not, Mr. Chamberlain says, one of those fortunate ones who can say, go to, I will sleep from ten until six, and then be fresh for my work. Sleep with her has to be wooed with subtle arts, and will follow no program. Sometimes her work goes reluctantly, and sometimes she is mastered and possessed by it, and it leaves her nervously exhausted, as well as disory and tea, regarding everyday affairs. After writing her dearfield massacre story, she found it hard to make herself realize that she was not living in the time and place of the story. She really believed that the story, her story, was true. For with a strong imagination is combined in her an extremely sensitive nature. Her father was remarkable for his nervousness, it is said, and so was her maternal grandfather. And Mrs. Clark assures us that the difficulties against which she contends are largely physical. Though her constitution is apparently sound, she is small, being only five feet tall, and is very slight. That was some years ago, today Ms. Wilkins is plump and vigour. She possesses the sensitive organization which accompanies a large intellectual development in such a frame. Her transparent skin, her changing eyes, sometimes seeming blue, sometimes hazel, her heavy braids of golden hair, her delicately molded features, all proclaim a singularly high strung and nervous temperament. Doubtless this influenced her choice of residence. Randolph is off the main line of literature, and perhaps that is why she has resisted the allurements of Boston. We saw her at a reunion of the daughters of Vermont, in the hub, once upon a time, and she acted now haughtily and again timidly as if she would like to rim home. Yet they say that with her chafing dish, her only hobby in hand, she is a prodigal hostess. Phillips Brooks is reported to have said that a humble romance was the best short story he ever read. It certainly reveals Ms. Wilkins in her strongest form. It is realism brought close to idealism. In its few pages are set forth simply yet artistically, in a manner characteristic of her most successful representation of rural life in New England, quaint humor and grave tragedy, melting pathos and tickling comedy. In the background a touch of careless virtue, and in the foreground an example of rough but admirable honor. Not every critic will go as far as Phillips Brooks went, but the discriminating critic will admit that a humble romance is one of the author's perfect efforts. Perhaps to an admirer of the demure woman of Randolph that is saying as much as could be said. A few days ago she said that Pembroke was probably her best work. In England, where she is hardly less beloved than in this country, a similar opinion exists among the leading critics. And, by the way, Mr. Kipling is reported to have declared that her stories will survive his, and at the same time to have confessed that they touch him altogether too deeply. But Ms. Wilkins' pen does not deal exclusively with rural life. In 1893 she turned to the stage for an arena, and Giles Corey Yeoman, a drama of the early Puritan days, was acted in Boston under the auspices of theater of arts and letters. Two years afterward, in collaboration with the aforementioned Mr. Chamberlain, she wrote a detective story, The Long Arm, which won a prize of two thousand dollars offered by a newspaper syndicate. Her latest novel, The Heart's Highway, dealt effectively with the colonial theme, and her next novel, A Portion of Labor, is the title of it, we believe, is said to have an industrial setting. The reading public whose interest in literature is not confined to books had taken it for granted that Ms. Wilkins would remain in single-blessedness for life. But in October 1900 was announced her engagement to Dr. Charles Manning Freeman of Maututa, New Jersey. Probably the author had never thought that she would live to be the central figure of a sensation, but she was, nevertheless, and the public soon began to ask when will the marriage take place? The question remains unanswered, but we betray no real secret by remarking that the affair is in no danger of ending like the bride-to-be's well-known story, Two Old Lovers. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kristen Edwards. R.H. Stoddard once said that Octave Thanette was the best writer of short stories in America. In fact, he went further, we believe, and said that he enjoyed her work more than that of any other writer of the day. That was in 1888. Without discussing the value of the opinion, we may say that the fair Westerner is writing as vigorously and as picturesquely as ever. And right here we shall take the liberty of anticipating a very natural question by reprinting some remarks she made a few years ago. How did I come to take the nom de plume of Octave Thanette? Well, really, that was an accident. I was a little wary of having my identity known in the first place and made up my mind to write under a fictitious name. Octave was the name of a school friend of mine. It is both French and Scotch. I thought if I could find another name to go with it that was both Scotch and French, I would adopt that. I was riding on a train one time when we stopped at a weigh station and on a sliding near where I sat was a freight car painted red. On the side was chalked the word Thanette. What it meant or how it got there, I have not the slightest idea, but I decided then and there to adopt it. Lots of people still think that Octave Thanette is a man and I frequently get letters like this. My dear Mr. Thanette, I have read your works and I am sure you are a manly man. They usually contain a request for a small loan to be repaid in the near future. There is an unmistakable masculine tinge in her style sometimes and her interests are half masculine. Her interest in the subject of the relations between capital and labor, for instance, is deeper than that of probably any other woman in the land, just as her knowledge of the subject is more extensive. Six years ago, besides, she took an active interest in the Flagler case in Washington and this year she displayed similar activity at Pittsfield mass in connection with the Fosburg case. It was she indeed who advanced the interesting theory that it may not have been thieves that entered the Fosburg house. Has it occurred to anyone, she asked, that at the very time the Fosburg firm were in the midst of a very serious difficulty with a labor union? And then she added what coming from not merely a student of industrial matters, but from an outspoken friend of the American working man seems startling. It is a characteristic of labor unions to regard a strike as war and you know all is fair in war. Such men are as honest in their conception of right as we are but they would think it as much a plan of campaign to do up the chief enemy as General Funston did in the capture of Aguinaldo. Men in such a cause would be just the kind to scorn to lay hands on valuables. They are not thieves, but they are as clannish as were the Irish at the time of the Phoenix Park murders and would never betray their own. But more of her sociology later let us turn to her life. Her name is Alice French and she was born in Andover Massachusetts on March 19th, 1850. Her father George Henry French was at one time in the bank business with Austin Corbin and 30 years ago he was the president of the Davenport and St. Paul Railroad. That was some 10 years after his change of residence from Andover to Davenport, Iowa. At Davenport he established an iron factory which business we understand is still conducted by his sons. The French is by the way are of Irish descent. The American branch of the stock was founded by Sir William French who emigrated to Massachusetts in the 17th century. One of his descendants took a prominent part in the Revolutionary War, the fighting parson of Andover they called him. Governor Marcus Morton was the father of Miss French's mother and Chief Justice Morton was Mrs. French's brother. On this side the author is descended from the Mayflower immigrants. One of these pioneers married Governor Bradford's sister. Miss French was educated at Abbott Academy and at Vassar. Her taste for the pen came as early as that of most other girls for the needle. I began writing like many another at an early age. She informed an interviewer in Washington six years ago and when I was at boarding school I surrepetitiously sent off a number of literary efforts to the magazines all of which were returned with thanks. No not all of them for through some accident one was printed in Goody's magazine and I was given a six month subscription and payment. I have never in after years received a check which gave me as much pleasure. My earlier efforts were devoted for the most part to very heavy essays on questions of sociology. I was a great student of history and political economy but for three years I made no addition to my literary work. I read everything that I thought would improve my style, saw everything I could that I thought would increase my powers of observation and literally worked hard at my preparation for a literary career. I wrote two very heavy essays on the subject of pauperism and if I had my own way today I would rather write history than fiction. Yet I suppose that fiction is the history of everyday life and may be made just as true a picture of our day and generation as a more laborious and ambitious effort. I sent one story at a time to the century and the editor suggested that I would be wise to confine myself to short stories. I cannot say that I wanted to altogether but I realized that I might make from 100 dollars to 300 dollars a year writing on social and economic questions and as I enjoy spending rather more money than I receive as dividends from an iron mill I decided to take his advice. Since then I have met with some degree of favor and success. All my stories that I have written since that three years of rest have been printed somewhere though not always where they were first sent. I have had stories that I sent to the leading magazines end up in a western weekly paper and received three dollars and a half when I had counted on fifty dollars. Doubtless the foregoing account may be regarded as reliable but we have met other conflicting statements. A member of Mrs. French's family has been referred to as the author of the statement that her first story was sent to Harper's Monthly and after a long and weary waiting it was published in their bazaar as being not up to the mark of the monthly magazine. According to Mrs. Lily B. Chase Wyman her sketch called A Communist's Wife was published by Lippincott's magazine in 1878 under the title of Communists and Capitalists. The young author received forty dollars for it. This may have been one of the two very heavy essays to which the author has referred. However it was the Bishop's Vagabond published in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1884 which forms the cornerstone of Octave Thanet's fame. It is a memorable story in many respects. It signalized the author's first display of her gift of narrative power and also her first attempt to portray southern character. Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton used to maintain that the story shows Octave Thanet at her best. It is certainly a remarkable welding of humor and pathos and the wreck of the train is as dramatic a scene as Sardieu himself ever drew. But while the dramatic element is in mind let us take a scene from Expiation, Ms. French's most ambitious work. The scene in which Bud Fowler covertly watches Fairfax Rutherford on guard over the villainous Dick Barnabas in the swamp. The gorilla is pleading to be freed and the hero is sorely perplexed. It's no use Barnabas I bear you no malice but I can't let you go. You doesn't let me go you're a coward screamed the wretch. His voice was terrible. Fairfax's face was wider than his. Instead of replying to the taunt he pulled a whiskey flask out of his pocket and threw it at the outlaw calling him to catch it drink it it would keep the cold out. But he would not look at the man gulping down the liquor and furious haste. He wheeled his horse to ride back a little distance thinking to get a better view through the trees and a call for help. At the same instant Betty Ward shied and something like a line of white fire sheared the air past him to bury itself in a cypress trunk where it hung quivering Dick Barnabas's bowy knife. Fairfax turned but not for the useless blow he turned because the wood was reverberating with the crash of a gunshot and a scream of agony. Where Dick had stood there remained only an awful base relief of a head and shoulders flung face downward with outstretched arms on the smooth black mud. A hand moved once the wind lifted the long black hair. That was all. In a few moments the smooth black surface was unbroken. Bud Fowler calmly stepped down from his perch in a swamp packberry tree at right angles to Fairfax. He was neither pale nor flushed but sallow and freckled and solemn looking as usual and as usual one of his hands was hitching up his trousers. All latter good whiskey plum wasted was his first speech. While he won't drink no more I promise Ma I'd kill him and I'd done it. For a small picture it is one of the most terribly dramatic in American fiction. In excitement it falls short of the rescue of the bishop in the bishop's vagabond the scene to which we referred previously but for grimness combined with brevity it is unsurpassably impressive. Coming back to Mrs. Malton's opinion and the question of preference there has for years been a strong popular and critical liking for The Ogre of Ha Ha Bay which it seems to us shows the author at her best. This story was printed in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1885. It won for Miss French the hearty admiration of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Truth she said to an interviewer once is what I seek above all things else. I want to tell my story as it really is and describe things in people as they really are which reminds us of a famous line that Kipling wrote a few years ago. I do not try to write purpose stories nor have my stories often a pointed moral. I say what I have to say and let my readers draw their own conclusions which reminds us if another intrusion will be excused of what a critic said when expiation and we all were new. There is a lurid realistic tone in some of her later fiction that does not impress us as favorably as that which had preceded it but Octave Thanet is stubborn in her purposes and erratic as witness her preposterous ideas on the Fosberg mystery. She does not court popularity but we were quoting her remarks. Yes I have written much of Western towns. I think it is in the villages and in the country districts that the best of our American citizenship can be found today not in the big cities. I am a believer in all things American and I believe too that many of the social questions that vex us today may be solved without hard feeling or trouble if both sides try to understand each other. Sympathy and understanding are needed. Ms. French is working hours are as long as the daylight is but she has her wholesome amusements also. She loves the southwestern country. There we are told she roams enthusiastically admiring the landscape which she calls ideally beautiful and her wanderings always strengthen her conviction that there are no forests like the cypress woods in spring. She has been want to spend a part of every summer in the east on the sands of Cape Cod. It was in the east a decade or so ago that she acquired no mean skill in photography. One who has reviewed the author at close range says many seeing Ms. French would readily believe her a very contented German. She is of medium height rather stout and has light brown curling hair now just beginning to mark the flight of time. Her expression is very animated and her conversations vivacious. She excels in cooking and is very domestic. She excels too we must say in the writing of short stories. Writers of that sort of literature have become almost as numerous in this country as blades of grass since Mr. Stoddard uttered his very flattering opinion of her but the name of Octave Thanet is still exceedingly brilliant and in a depthness of construction and power of expression and vividness of portrayal the author of The Bishop's Vagabond still remains among our foremost writers of fiction. End of chapter 10. Chapter 11 of Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Kristin Edwards. Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books by Edward Francis Harkins Chapter 11. Marshall Saunders There was once a young French man who was studying the painter's art similar to the usual student of small stature and equally small means. He had an enormous ambition. He worked with a will and yet in every sketch of casts of moving figures or of still life his restless fingers always ran instinctively to the military. The signing of his name to a poster or oil would always be accompanied by some small token of a soldier's life a bugle, a bayonet, a queer seers helmet or whatnot. One day his instructor accosted him thus, well you have been a good student and a hard worker but you should be a general go and join the army. He followed this advice but the overwhelming sense of the artistic in his nature drew him back again to the pencil and the paintbrush. When he died the greatest delineator of European military life had been lost to the world. This incident bears directly upon the life and art of Marshall Saunders for hers is a mind that has its own particular sphere of creative ability and in this sphere it has remained and has one success. The same invisible something that drew the Frenchman's fingers to the soldier has drawn the imagination of Miss Saunders to the delineation of the lives and characteristics of simple natures. Differing also from a prominent American authorist who gave promise of masterful work in this same sphere by one great story on the American child but disappointed those who expected wonderful things by spending the time subsequent to its production in the creation of romances of a degenerate English aristocracy. Miss Saunders has followed the success of her first great juvenile with other successes of equal merit. The Adventures of Tilda Jane in 1901 is a chronicle which bids fair to be as widely read as the story of Beautiful Joe which appeared in 1894 and has sold 400,000 strong. Worth alone could stimulate such a reading. This worth is of a character which is similar to the motto of most successful businessman. In the long run honesty is the best policy. The value of her writing is the value that the stories of Louisa May Alcott possess that of purity honesty and simplicity characteristics which are alone able to sustain the respect and admiration of the Anglo-Saxon no matter in what direction they are employed. She was born at her grandfather's house in Milton Queens County, Nova Scotia on April 13th 1861 and is the daughter of a clergyman. In early life he conducted her education and as he was a great Latin scholar gave her a thorough drilling in that language a foundation which is undeniably accountable for the purity and vigor of her style. At the age of six an occurrence took place that was a memorable one for a child of her years. The family left their beautiful country home and moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia and of her first impressions of the city she has said I shall never forget the feeling of depression as I gathered my brothers and sisters around me. I am the eldest of the family and sitting on our front doorstep surveyed the rows of houses opposite what a change in our lives. We country plants had been transferred to the arid soil of a city. We turned our backs on the confusion of unpacking and wandered up and down the street. I remember being particularly struck with a row of seven houses all alike. Such a thing had been unknown in my previous experience. With the adaptability of childhood however she soon became accustomed to city life although her love for the country has ever been the stronger. She was educated in public and private schools until 15 when at a Presbyterian boarding school in Scotland she learned how to stifle the agonies of homesickness. After a year in Edinburgh she was sent to France where she was thrown almost entirely with French people and a year or two later returned to Nova Scotia brimful of fun having passed through many interesting experiences and with nothing now to do. For some time she taught school and then began her literary work and quite by chance. In her own words she tells us that upon one occasion her father asked her to reply to a letter that he had recently received from Dr. Rand a professor in a Canadian college. The subject matter of the correspondence was of a public character and had its humor aside. In replying to the letter of the professor who had been from early childhood an intimate friend of the family I indulged in some banter which impressed him. In his reply to my father he said judging from Marshall's letter her calling is assured why does she not begin at once to write. The idea struck me as an exceedingly amusing one and not until the intimate friend had referred to it again did I consider it then I asked him what shall I write about. Right of the beauty of our winter scenery he responded of the stillness of the woods the rabbits track in the snow. I was grateful to him for the suggestion but did not seem able to act upon it. However I turned the matter over in my mind and shortly afterwards when both my parents were away in the country took pen and paper and sat down to write. I was then twenty three years old and the sensational appealed to me more strongly than anything else. I could make nothing of the rabbit so disregarded him for a burglar. In three weeks I had concocted a story of a man his wife and a robbery. Now what to do with it? I went to town with my sister Rita my first confidant in literary affairs and bought an armful of magazines and papers. Her sister was as ignorant as she was but between them they decided on the Leslie publications. They if any would be able to appreciate her venture so the story was mailed and the result was anxiously awaited. One day her parents came home and she went to them with a letter. Mrs. Frank Leslie had sent her $40 for her story and she would be pleased to get another one. My sister and I made a rapid and jubilant calculation she tells us. $40 for every three weeks in the year what a comfortable amount of pin money. Alas the next story was promptly rejected. However my parents came to my rescue. You can write and you like to write my father said take all the time you wish and remember that uninterrupted success does not come to anyone setting out on any career. Therefore I wrote on. I needed practice and occasionally I sent a story to some paper or magazine. Some were accepted more rejected and there is one dismal entry in my notebook. Two stories stolen by a literary bureau. With excellent judgment she now spent several years in foreign travel and returning to Nova Scotia began writing more vigorously than ever. She became correspondent for a Canadian newspaper but it was not until 1887 that she had the gratification of seeing one of her own productions in book form. It was called My Spanish Sailor and was brought out by a London firm. Its reception by the English press was a warm one but did not ensure a large sail either in England or Canada. Nothing daunted she still applied herself diligently to literary work and in 1892 after returning from a year's visit in northern Canada saw the advertisement of the American Humane Educational Society for a Story About Animals and became immediately possessed with the desire of competing for it for she is passionately fond of dumb creatures and had never attempted a story about them. The preparation of Beautiful Joe took six months and the story was largely of her own life. It gained the coveted prize which was $200 but the alternative was offered the author of retaining the manuscript and forfeiting the prize. This she preferred and for six months Beautiful Joe went begging among the publishers. Finally it fell into the hands of a firm in Philadelphia one of whose members recognized its merit and accepted the responsibility of bringing it out. In a few years it had sold over 200,000 copies and had been translated into Swedish German and Japanese. Since the publication of Our Dogs by John Brown and the touching story of Rab and his friends by the same author no better or more sympathetic narrative of animal life has yet appeared. Daisy a short temperance story written for the English charity was published during the following year and Charles and his lamb in 1896. This was likewise a children's story and although it did not share the great popularity of Beautiful Joe a letter written by an Italian princess to the author will show how far from home it penetrated and was appreciated. Writing from Naples she touchingly remarked I never read anything sweeter in my life than the story of that darling child and his lamb. May the dear father who made them both bless them both and her too who has written so lovingly of them. Such epistles as these are more to be desired than the most flattering criticism of the keen reviewer who has become so satiated with manuscript, an excellent manuscript at that, that only the most artistic work could unloosen a word of ardent praise an imminent critic has said. It is similar to the word of admiration the minister receives from the poor parishioner who from the very last seat in the fashionably crowded church has listened with appreciation to his words of hope and comfort. His simple commendation gives more genuine and lasting satisfaction than the well phrased and laudatory paragraph in the ecclesiastical review. For the other boy's sake came out in 1897 and the house of armor the king of the park and rose a charlotte in 1898. Of them the latter a tale of the country of Longfellow's Evangeline was destined to meet with a most favorable reception. Many of the Arcadians it is known after enduring unutterable hardships and exile found their way back to the land of their birth and there resettled the abandoned country and made new homes. In the western part of Nova Scotia there is one continuous village 35 miles in length which winds about the sinuous curve of St. Mary's Bay. It is here that the Arcadians live separately from the English to the present day and still preserve their language traditions customs and unique manner of life. Here Miss Saunders spent the summer of 1897 and rose a charlotte was the resultant. In 1899 appeared deficient saints a story of Maine in which the characters were of the same wholesome purity that has typified the productions of her imagination. They were descendants of an old French family whose home for many years had been in Maine and the plot dealt in the reunion of the many branches of the original house and the obstructive workings of the French and Puritan emotions in each individual. It was soon followed by her sailor which was her first novel rewritten for his country a patriotic story for children and Tilda Jane which first appeared in the youth's companion and was from the beginning a tremendous success. Tilda Jane is a small orphan who seeks industriously for a home and the experiences through which she passes in the endeavor to reach the coveted object possess a pathetic humor that is of peculiar charm. Miss Saunders is exceedingly fond of local stories and to collect material for this narrative traveled through Maine with notebook in hand. The orphan arouses interest because she appeals to that longing in every human breast the longing for a happy home. Tilda wanted a fire and a rocking chair and someone to smooth her head and call her my own dear child. Mr. Angle president of the American Humane Society has said it is not enough to educate the intellect but that one must also educate the heart that the schools and colleges are multiplying but that crime is on the increase that if one but teaches the little child his duty to the lower creation statistics prove that he will be more mindful of duty to the higher. This idea Miss Saunders has assimilated and consequently her pet hobby is that of humane education. Her apprenticeship has indeed been a long and varied one. Articles from her pen and of varying lengths have appeared in nearly every important magazine in this country and in Canada and as she says of Tilda Jane I am learning all the time and have profited by former mistakes in its composition. It is only rarely that a real character is put into a story. The heroine of Beautiful Joe was her own beloved sister who died at the age of 17 and her character was faithfully drawn but usually she prefers to use suggestions a little from here there and from everywhere. The fact that as a child she enjoyed boys books because they possessed more life and energy than stories for girls in some measure accounts for the vitality that she has shown in most of her productions. Throughout her life she has been an omnivorous reader making literary pilgrimages in the city to the shrines of ancient and modern historians and when all else failed taking to a cyclopedia of anecdotes of literature and fine arts. In the country some of her dearest spots were the old garrets from their hiding places under the eaves I would draw out old books and back numbers of magazines reading has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life representing as she does the best and purest moral force in literature and in a century when there seems to be danger of a literary degradation through popular clamor for books of a realistic and questionable type it is just a hope for what one of Dickens's characters so much desired a plenty and as hot often the stove as it will come that we cannot put in a plea of a similar nature for literary preparation as all who try well know must be undertaken first with pains and again with time in order to excel we can at least make the additional remark that the world will be all the better for more beautiful joes until the janes. End of chapter 11. Chapter 12 of little pilgrimages among the women who have written famous books. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Little Pilgrimages among the women who have written famous books by Edward Francis Harkins. Chapter 12. Kate Douglas Wigan. Mrs. Riggs. As a post script to a very amusing letter which Kate Douglas Wigan had written to an inquisitive biographer and which she had addressed to my dear Boswell and playfully ended with, believe me my dear Bosie, sincerely your Johnson, K. D. W. Her sister added the following. My sister was certainly a capable little person at a tender age, concocting delectable milk toast, browning toothsome buckwheats, and generally making a very good parent's assistant. I have also visions of her toiling at patchwork and over-sewing sheets like a nice old-fashioned little girl in a storybook. And in connection with the Lindsay Woolsey frock and the sled before mentioned, I see a blue and white hood with a mass of shining fair hair escaping below it, and a pair of very pink cheeks. Further to illustrate her personality, I think no one much in her company at any age could have failed to note an exceedingly lively tongue and a general air of executive ability. If I am to be truthful, I must say that I recall few indications of a budding authorship save an engrossing diary, kept for six months only, and a devotion to reading. Her literary passions were the Arabian Knights, Scottish Chiefs, Don Quixote, Sadius of Warsaw, Irving's Muhammad, Thackeray's Snobbs, Undine, and the Martyrs of Spain. These volumes joined to an old green Shakespeare and a plum pudding edition of Dickens with a chief of her diet. But stay! While I am talking of literary tendencies, I do remember a certain prize essay entitled Pictures in the Clouds, not so called because it took the prize alas, but because it competed for it. There is also a myth in the household, doubtless invented by my mother, that my sister learned her letters from the signs in the street and taught herself to read when scarcely out of long clothes. This may be cited as a bit of corroborative detail, though personally I never believed in it. Johnson's sister, N-A-S. The lively tongue and general air of executive ability, which were hers as a child, are what have won her success in later years. Wisdom and wit, practical knowledge and capacity, have here blended with curious balance. Perhaps the varied experiences of her career have been of exceptional influence, and have stimulated a keener insight into things human, and a more delicate and humorous appreciation of certain phases of life than others possess. Her ancestors indeed bestowed good gifts, for they were men of prominence in the church, in politics, and at the New England Bar, combining a certain shrewd humor with stern, puritan wholesomeness, many traditions of which have been handed down in the family. Her environment has also been diversified. Born in Philadelphia, she was educated in New England, next transplanted to California, and then brought back to the Atlantic Coast, where she has only spasmodically remained. The excellent and wholesome St. Nicholas had the honor of receiving Kate Douglas Smith's first article, written at the age of eighteen, and for it donated the sum of one hundred and fifty dollars. At the time it was composed, she was studying methods of the kindergarten under the celebrated Emma Marshall in California, and the story, Half a dozen housekeepers, was relative to this interesting work. To California she had moved after the death of her stepfather, and here she was teaching in the Santa Barbara College, when called upon to organize the first free kindergarten west of the Rocky Mountains. The Silver Street Kindergarten in San Francisco was the outcome of her individual efforts and those of her sister. It was not only a great object lesson, but was the progenitor of fifty-six other similar schools, and the inspiration for similar efforts in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and the Hawaiian Islands. The first year of its existence fifteen hundred people visited this novelty in primary education, and it did effective and telling work, for with the poorest of the city Mrs. Wiggins energy was principally devoted, and the school was, and is at the present time, located in the slums of San Francisco. Upon the wall of one of the rooms, which is a favorite with the children, is a lifelike portrait of the founder, underneath which are the following words, Kate Douglas Wigan. In this room was born the first free kindergarten west of the Rocky Mountains. Let me have the happiness of looking down upon many successive groups of children sitting in these same seats. Shortly after the school had been placed upon a stable basis, its originator was united in marriage to Mr. Samuel Bradley Wigan, a talented young lawyer. She now gave up teaching, but continued to give weekly lectures to the training class, and to visit the many kindergartens which had resulted from the spirit and individuality which she had infused into this movement. She thus unconsciously obtained a thorough knowledge of human nature, and as a result of her observations the story of Patsy was written and printed in San Francisco. It was to raise money for her work, and three thousand copies were quickly disposed of without the publisher's aid. This was soon followed by The Bird's Christmas Carol, a book equally popular and written with the same end in view. A few years later, in 1888, Mr. and Mrs. Wigan moved to New York, where the friends of this brilliant authoress, who at that time was totally unknown to the East, urged upon her to offer the two books to an Eastern publisher. Acting upon their advice, she submitted Patsy and the Carol to Houghton Mifflin and Company, although it is not customary to reprint work that has already appeared elsewhere, and in book form. Their success under the stamp of this great New England house was exceptional. The children of The Bird's Christmas Carol have endeared Kate Douglas Wigan to thousands in America, and this is her most popular work in Great Britain. It has been translated into Japanese, French, German and Swedish, and has also been put into raised type for the blind. The next publication, the story of Timothy's Quest, had an interesting beginning, for it originated from the unsuspecting remark of a little child, who, in speaking of a certain house, quite wittily remarked, I think they need some babies there. This Mrs. Wigan's remembered, and jotted down in her notebook Needing Babies. Soon afterwards the story of Little Timothy appeared. It is a favorite in Denmark, has found its way into a Swedish edition, and has also been published in the Tauchnitz series. Polly Oliver's problem was next written, and has been highly praised by Rudyard Kipling, who considers Polly Oliver the most delightful heroine in English fiction. It has likewise been translated into several foreign languages, and is one of a collection of her books with unique illustrations corresponding to the life of the country in which they have been published. Mr. Wigan died soon after leaving San Francisco, and his wife, who was separated from her interesting employment in California, threw herself with great energy into the kindergarten movement in the city, which, at the time, was absorbing much popular attention, and was the subject of considerable agitation in the newspapers. In order to further the interests of her work she was eventually enticed to read from her own books, and at this was most successful. Her interpretation of her own characters is full of taste and feeling, and her reading has always been for purposes of a purely philanthropic nature, and especially for her own pet cause, the introduction of kindergartens, an object for which she still works with untiring zeal and continued interest. Apropos of her affection for literature she has characteristically remarked that she would rather write a story for the mere love of the creative work than for the most exorbitant pay. When a very young child she was brought up at the quiet and secluded little hamlet of Hollis, Maine, and since her return to the East has completed most of her literary work at a rambling old-fashioned house called Quillcote. For those summers which have not been passed in foreign travel have been spent in the seclusion of this quaint family mansion. The house itself is similar to many New England homesteads, for it is of colonial architecture, with broad eaves, and is surrounded by graceful elms. Its situation is upon a slight eminence, from which one can well view the fertile valleys that stretch in front, and in the distance the undulating foothills of Mount Washington. A glance into her sanctum upon the second floor shows that here is a literary workman who dearly loves order, for every detail shows neatness and exactitude. Interesting gifts and souvenirs are scattered about, together with many tributes from admirers in various and far distant lands. The windows overlook a broad plot of grass, studded with graceful trees, where, from May till after nesting time, robins, orioles, bluebirds, and many other songsters hold high and joyous carnival. But a short distance away, at the foot of a precipitous bank, the Soco River flows quietly toward the sea, an ideal spot, in fact, for delicate creations of the imagination. The pleasant river in Timothy's Quest is this winding stream, and many of the scenes and descriptions in the Village Watchtower were taken from this quiet neighborhood. Since her marriage to Mr. George Christopher Riggs in 1895, Mrs. Riggs has spent much time abroad, and has become closely associated with the British Isles, for, although no anglomaniac, she is very fond of the English people, and has many warm friends across the Atlantic. Penelope's English experiences was an excellent portrayal of her own impressions among them, and from life in Edinburgh, springtimes in the Highlands, and summer in the Fertile Lowlands grew Penelope's Progress, a book widely read, and as much appreciated and laughed over as heartily in the Land of the Heather as it has been in America. During this time Ireland has only now and again received a flying visit, and at rare intervals. But as the public began to clamour for an Irish Penelope to complete the series, in the summer of 1900 Mrs. Wiggins made a long journey to the Isle of Arran, and as a result we had the extraordinary and humorous Penelope's Irish experiences. It is said that when an English author heard of the proposed visit, he expressed hearty approval upon patriotic grounds, with the witty remark that, if the projected book remained unwritten, Ireland would for once have a real grievance, and questions would be asked in the house, which Mr. Balfour would find it difficult to answer. END OF CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. GERTRUDE Atherton. Ten years ago the name of Gertrude Atherton had a remote place in American literature. What place does the name occupy today? It is really hard to say. One critic has boldly likened her to George Elliot. Another has spoken of her as a literary experimenter on generally unfortunate subjects. Of one thing we are certain, the reading public takes a lively interest in her books. Probably Mrs. Atherton would wish to be judged by Senator North. That story, to be sure, appeared during a period of flamboyant advertising, when many books were expanded balloon-like, some of them to explode ignominiously. Let us see what sort of judgment was passed on the author of Senator North. The critic who saw in her another George Elliot said, Mrs. Atherton is a real writer in every sense of the word. She is as born to tell stories as the men who made the Arabian Knights, and she has that rare power of evoking a living human being with a stroke or two, with almost the mere mention of a name. However she may elaborate a character later on, we never have to wait for that elaboration to realize her heroes and heroines. Like a clever hostess, she has a gift for making them really known to the reader by little more than saying Miss So-and-So, or she will start off with a bit of dialogue that subtly sets two people before you in less than a page. Then she has that command of a spontaneous, direct, supple, and pointed pro-style, which is entirely free from affectation. She is one of the wittiest of modern writers, but the wit is the crackling of the super-abundant electricity of her brain, and not that paradoxical jigging of the mind which is one of the warnings of cerebral paralysis. She is smart, of course, at times, but all wit is sometimes that. More than any living writer I can think of, her wit reminds me, in its essential quality, of Mr. George Meredith, though superficially it lacks the mannerisms which occasionally obscure the calm spaces of that great wisdom. Real wit flashes out of the full conquering mind, as real laughter ripples from a full, happy heart, like wine out of a bottle. Another opinion, possibly a minority opinion, handed down, characterized Senator North as a somewhat hysterical study of Washington life. The judge passed over the literary aspects of the case, however, and differed with Mrs. Atherton on sociological points. It has been thus for the last six years. We doubt that any other American romances divides the critics into two camps, so regularly and so resistlessly. Of the profitable faculty of exciting critical disputes, Mrs. Atherton is one of the largest possessors. During the reign of Senator North, we met the suggestion that an Atherton birthday book might be compiled. Here are a few quotations, taken at random from Senator North that illustrate the author's wit and wisdom. Betty, the heroine, of course you remember Betty Madison, had been educated by private tutors, then taken abroad for two years to France, Germany, and Italy, in order, as she herself observed, to make the foreign attaché feel more at ease when he proposed. We are none of us taken long for what we are not. Betty thought the women very nice, but less interesting than the men, possibly because they were women. The good in human nature predominates. Washington had a brain of ice, and his ideal of American propriety was frozen within it. Women make a god of what they cannot understand in a man. If he has a bad temper, they think of him as a dominant personality. Her husband, brilliant and charming, had possessed a set of affections too restless and ardent to confine themselves within the domestic limits. His wife had buried him with sorrow, but with a deep sigh of relief that, for the future, she could mourn him without protest. You have always prided yourself, remarks Betty, that I am intellectual, and so I am in the flabby, well-read fashion. I feel as if my brain had been a mausoleum for skeletons and mummies. Frankly, we discovered nothing in Mrs. Atherton to warrant crowning her with the laurels worn by George Elliot. As we have already said, Senator North and its predecessors all stirred up more or less controversy, sometimes social, as in the case of American men and English women, but more often literary. For strictly within the limits of literary criticism stands the matter of choice of a subject, and even her staunchest admirers would not claim that the Californian writer has been very happy in the choice of subjects. By subjects we mean especially characters of which perhaps the most unfortunate is the young woman in A Daughter of the Vine. Admitted too by some of her most enthusiastic adherents is the fact that Mrs. Atherton's genius is a variable quality. She is unequal, of course, remarks one, but seeing that every real writer that ever lived has been unequal and the greatest most unequal, it is a weak concession to modern phases of criticism even to mention that universal limitation. Yes, Mrs. Atherton is unequal indeed. Inequality, if that be the word, is prominent in her intellectual makeup. Her writings fit the description of her movements. Uncertain, impetuous. One day she is penning a chapter to fascinate her friends and stagger the poor literary gentry. The next day she is airing her opinions in the columns of a yellow journal. Mrs. Atherton was born in the Rincan Hill Quarter of San Francisco in 1857. Her mother was the daughter of Stephen Franklin, a descendant of the immortal Benjamin's youngest brother, John. Stephen Franklin left Oxford, New York, when he was a young man, and went to New Orleans, where, after having amassed a large fortune, he was almost ruined by a false partner. He then moved from New Orleans to Central America, and later to California, where before long he became influential. When his daughter, who had been educated at Spingler Institute in New York City, arrived in California, she was hailed as the most beautiful girl in the country. She married Thomas L. Horn, a native of Stonington, Connecticut, who was a prominent citizen of San Francisco and a member of the Historical Vigilant Committee. Gertrude attended various small private schools for a time. Afterward she was a pupil at St. Mary's Hall, Benisha, California, and at Sare Institute, Lexington, Kentucky. But delicate health kept her away from school a great deal, and thus she came to enjoy the tutelage of her grandparents. At the age of four she was taught reading and spelling by her grandmother. Her grandfather, Mr. Franklin, who meantime had established the first newspaper of San Francisco, the Golden Era, possessed the largest private library in the state, and therein Gertrude was free to browse before she had entered her teens. It is not to be wondered at that her mind had an early development, that it acquired some masculinity and considerable originality, that it formed a taste for strange flavored literature. And there was an abundance of that kind of literature in the library, books that had come down from generation to generation. We can trace back to this juvenile independence, this mingling of youth with old age, many of the author's idiosyncrasies. Although the Greek and Latin classics were in the library, we have been informed that Gertrude derived her knowledge of ancient literature mostly from translations. For this Emerson would have applauded her, and Gladstone scolded her. Gertrude still had two years of school before her when she married George Henry Bowen Atherton of Menlo Park, California, a Chilean by birth as was his mother, but an American on his father's side. At the time of the marriage the Athertons, socially, were the leading family of California. Of the beginning of her literary career Mrs. Atherton has informed us. I began to write, or rather to compose, which took then the form of spinning astonishing yarns about my daily doings when I was at some tender age, and when I went to school I remember the big girls gave me blank books in which to write stories for them. The first story I published, shortly after I married, was called The Randolphs of Redwoods, and was the same fundamentally as The Daughter of the Vine. It was published in the San Francisco Argonaut. The name of my first published book, although I should like all my ancient and amateur efforts to rest decently in their graves, was What Dreams May Come, which came out in 1888. Then came Hermia Seidem, Los Cerritos, The Doomswoman, A Whirl Asunder, Patient Sparhock in Her Times, His Fortunate Grace, American Wives and English Husbands, The Californians, A Daughter of the Vine, and Senator North. At the age of fifteen we are told she wrote a play which was acted at St. Mary's Hall, Benisha, California. It was Mrs. Atherton's early purpose to exploit the romance of the juvenile age of the far west. She went about her task wisely and energetically. There was a temptation to depend upon the more or less mythical tradition, which from time to time found its way into the San Francisco newspapers, but Mrs. Atherton put this aside and went straight to headquarters. They say that she made her residence in the old Adobe settlements, and with sharpened eyes and ears mixed with the surviving Spanish pioneers. For they too were pioneers, those hardy, brown-faced men and women from over the sea, pioneers no less than the Americans who pushed on farther north, even to the shores of the Columbia. And though their history has less of the strenuous in it than that of the resolute state-makers who followed Lewis and Clark, still it has as much of the picturesque and of the romantic. Out of these experiences Mrs. Atherton wrote before the gringo came, which was published in 1893. Her first books were as rounds of the latter. Patient Sparhock finally brought her into prominence. We mean literary prominence. Her sharp comments on Anglo-American society had elevated her to the distinction of a subject of public controversy. Naturally enough, Mrs. Atherton's popularity was first established in the West, and it is the West that up to today has been truest to her. It is in the West that one still meets such a remark as this, for instance. But whatever her shortcomings, Mrs. Atherton is the buoyant possessor of three important qualities of the novelist. The novelist, that is, pure and simple. She compels one to read on, she can tell a story, and she creates characters. And all these things she does not because she tries but because she cannot help it. We still meet readers, and many readers, by the way, are persons of superlatively fine judgment, who prefer Patient Sparhock in her times, which was published in 1897, to all the other Atherton books. Certainly, previous to Senator North, it was the novelist's most ambitious and most praiseworthy effort. It came within an ace of being a literary phenomenon, for it must be remembered that in her youth Mrs. Atherton missed many of the advantages enjoyed by the average girl. San Francisco, to be sure, was not without a strong literary atmosphere, nor was it without the appearances of polite society. Vidae Bret Hart's Under the Red Woods. But Gertrude had been pent up, immured, and she had been fed mostly at the old-fashioned classical table. We have been informed that until her marriage she had only the barest acquaintance with modern fiction, that is, we presume, with American novels. This is much the same as if Claude Monet had in his youth been acquainted only with Perugino and Fra Angelico. Fancy and impressionist reared on such a diet. But it was in Mrs. Atherton to write powerfully and originally. Almost as powerfully and originally, sometimes, as any other woman among her contemporaries. After her husband's death Mrs. Atherton crossed the continent to New York. Then she spent some years abroad. She went abroad, she declares rather bitterly, to make my reputation for the press and the literary powers here fought me persistently. I suppose because I was not a child of the regiment. Now a great many American publishers ask for my books. The press and the literary powers of the country may have fought her persistently, but they could not have fought her maliciously. She also declares that she thinks with the advanced minority, which is precious small in this country. Such a declaration, coming from a woman, compels silence. Mrs. Atherton, by the way, is to return to Europe very soon. During the greater part of the year she has been engaged on a dramatized biography, as she calls it, of Alexander Hamilton. She says of it, a novel is a pivotal thing. This is written with the sequence of biography, nothing omitted, not even funding, taxes, and finance. But the personalities carry off the tiresome subjects to the average reader, and there is no great amount of detail. She will also edit a volume of Hamilton's letters. The dramatized biography is due to appear early this season, under the title of The Conqueror. CHAPTER XIV John Oliver Hobbs is the pseudonym of Mrs. Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie. It appeared first in 1891, in the pseudonym library, over the study entitled, Some Emotions and a Moral. It is related that the first publisher to whom that story was offered accepted it on condition that the author find another title and make other lesser changes. She refused to make a single change, and the work finally went to a more courageous, and we may say longer-headed, publisher. The author proposes, and the publisher disposes, is not an everyday maxim. Mrs. Craigie, doubtless many readers will be surprised to learn it, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 3rd, 1867. Her mother's maiden name was Laura Hortense Arnold. Her father, John Morgan Richards, is the son of the Reverend James Richards, D.D., the founder of Auburn Theological Seminary, New York. Pearl was educated first privately, by tutors, then in Paris, and then in London, where for a good many years her father has chosen to reside. In London she was a pupil at University College. There she studied the ancient classics enthusiastically, and there she attracted the attention of the well-known Professor Goodwin, by whose advice later she took up literature as a profession. In 1887, at the age of nineteen, she was married to Mr. Reginald Walpole Craigie, a member of a well-established English family. Four years after the marriage she left her husband, taking with her their child, John Churchill Craigie, who was born in August 1890, and in 1895 the separation culminated in a divorce. Since then Mrs. Craigie and her son have lived with her parents at 56 Lancaster Gate West, London. Her amusements are music and chess. This in brief is the biography of one of the most brilliant figures in contemporary English literature. And we hasten to claim her for America, for notwithstanding her long residence abroad, notwithstanding her English interests and associations, she is at heart we hear a very staunch American. But in the first place she is an intellectual cosmopolite. Her gifts have brought back to her a welcome from wherever men and women read English, and today English is the language of the Four Corners of the Globe. In one respect Mrs. Craigie reminds us of her greatest hero, Robert Orange. We do not need to lift the veil of domesticity to form the opinion that married life half stifled her ambition. She was not born to serve two masters. Orange was too sincere a man to take advantage of Parflett's death. His heart said Rome, and to Rome he went, and we can see him going, tranquilly yet determinedly. In some such manner, we fancy, Mrs. Craigie must have gone back to her father's house. Literally too she went to Rome, for she became a Roman Catholic in 1892, the year following the separation from her husband. The year 1891 was doubly momentous. It saw not only her departure from under her husband's roof, but also the publication of her first book, Some Emotions and a Moral. We have been informed that 80,000 copies were sold in a few weeks. Anyhow it is a positive fact that the book was one of the sensations of the day. For a long while the reading public remained incredulous over the announcement that the author was a woman. It was not merely the pseudonym, John Oliver Hobbes, that excited the incredulity. It was also the form and the style of the book itself. Mrs. Craigie once remarked that women are at a disadvantage in picturing men in their relations one to the other, particularly in the intimate relations of the mess room and the smoking room, and she cited Jane Austen's consummate tact in eluding the difficulty by keeping men apart or rather by keeping them in the society of women. It oftentimes demands consummate tact to enforce the realization of a limitation, and in an artist the inability to paint things as they are is certainly a grave limitation. Of such a limitation the author of Robert Orange, we mention her most notable book, betrays no consciousness, for it is not in her. She affords us the enjoyment rather of consummate skill than of consummate tact. Therein she resembles not Jane Austen, but George Elliot. At the same time we remember that when Robert Orange was the rage some critics charged Mrs. Craigie with the lack of the power of convincing. This is a fanciful hero, they declared. Can a man love a woman so humanly, so deliriously as is herein depicted, asked one of them, while being simultaneously drawn toward the monastic life? The novelist gave the best of answers, that Robert Orange was no mere production of the imagination, no embodiment of an idea, but a study from life. The fact is, to make use of the novelist's expression, character is infinitely various, and the possibilities of action are inexhaustible. When a fictitious personage does or says an incredible thing, of course I am not speaking of fairy tales, but a fiction that bears some relation to fact, it is incredible, not in the abstract as it were, but because it is wrongly correlated to the individual character. Speaking for myself, I hate and distrust plausibility. No writer is so little plausible as Balzac. His people are as full of surprises as our own most intimate friends. We recall the comment that Mrs. Craigie's pages are filled with such subtle observations, straight philosophy, and shining epigrams, that they must be read slowly to be enjoyed. They are indeed, as a rule, pages relishable to the last word. Their psychology is always interesting, and sometimes deeply affecting. Their page is not made to suit Marion Crawford's dictum, that a novel should be mere entertainment, assuming that his definition of entertainment goes no further than shivers and laughs. They who have found Mr. Crawford's, in the Palace of the King, the best of entertainment, may have gone to sleep over Mrs. Craigie's the School for Saints. Plausibility is not always to be distrusted. How prolix to such persons must have seemed the pages describing the journey of the hero and the heroine of Robert Orange to St. Malo. Orange had suddenly plunged from irresolution into marriage, and as he looked down on Brigitte's face in the starlight, his secret ideals returned to trouble him. The author suddenly plunges into the philosophy of the situation. Men's designs are never so indefinite and confused as when they meet with no outward resistance. A close attack has proved the salvation of most human wills, and roused the energy of many drooping convictions. It is seldom good that one should enter into any vocation very easily, sweetly, and without strife. The best apprenticeships, whether ecclesiastical or religious, or civil or military, or political or artistic, are never the most calm. Whether we study the lives of saints or the lives of those distinguished in any walk of human endeavor, where perfection, in some degree or other, has been at least the goal, we always find that the first years of the pursuit have been one bitter history of temptations, doubts, despondencies, struggles, and agonizing inconsistencies of volition. To nature's cold originally, or extinguished by a false asceticism, many seeming acts of sacrifice are but the subtle indulgence of that curious selfishness, which is not the more spiritual because it is independent of others, or the less repulsive because it is most contented in its isolation from every responsibility. A renunciation means the deliberate putting away of something keenly loved, anxiously desired, or actually possessed. It does not mean a well-weighed acceptance of the lesser rather than the greater trials of life. All this in a breath, we may say, and yet a dozen lines further on begins another page of philosophical speculations. Mrs. Craigie is not content to paint the body, she must paint the soul also. For the most part they are the speculations met on the road from Aristotle to Cardinal Newman, but for the most part too they have been freshened and garnished in the novelist's analytical mind. Her analytical faculties seem to have undergone a large development during the period of her domestic trouble and religious doubts. It was then, for the first time, that her mind came into contact with the minds of the great Christian psychologists. Has it ever struck you, she asked a visitor casually, that the Church of Rome, which alone among the churches of Western Europe enjoins and enforces continual examinations of conscience, is the real creator of modern analytical fiction? The Fathers of the Church are the Fathers of Psychology. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernard, and Abelard, where will you find subtler soul-searching than in their writings? In soul-searching the author of Love and the Soul Hunters, an appropriate title for the moment, is not excelled by any of her contemporaries, not even by the Chirurgical Daredevil, Gabriele Danuncio. Yet she has also written passages of heart-touching tenderness, nor is she above smiles and little satires. Indeed, to mention love, who that ever reads it can soon forget the impassioned confession of Lady Sarah Louise Tatiana Valerie de Travorelle. I never say my prayers because I cannot say them, but I love somebody too. Whenever I hear his name I could faint. When I see him I could sink into the ground. At the side of his handwriting I grow cold from head to foot. I tremble, my heart aches so that it seems breaking in two. I long to be with him, yet when I am with him I have nothing to say. I have to escape and be miserable all alone. He is my thought all day, the last before I sleep, the first when I awake. I could cry and cry and cry. I try to read and I remember not a word. I like playing best, for then I can almost imagine that he is listening. But when I stop playing and look round I find myself in an empty room. It is awful. I call his name. No one answers. I whisper it, still no answer. I throw myself on the ground and I say, think of me, think of me. You shall, you must, you do think of me. It is great torture and a great despair. Perhaps it is a madness too. But it is my way of loving. I want to live while I live. If I knew for certain that he loved me, me only, the joy I think would kill me. Love, do you know, poor little angel, what it means? Sometimes it is a curse. It is more than plausible that Ponce, who had to listen to this, was really shaking like some small flower in a violent gale. Lately Mrs. Craigie has done some writing for the stage. Without question the best of her plays is The Ambassador, which fulfills Mr. Howell's ideal. For like one of the best of Oscar Wilde's plays, or Mr. Pinero's, it is as lustrous between covers as in the theatre. But all in all, our heroine's career as a playwright has not been a flattering experience, and we were not unprepared for her recent statement that the public does not want to think in the theatre, or to have the serious aspects of life forced upon its attention. What it chiefly wants is flattery. And so on, in the traditional manner of the fallen idol. Fortunately perhaps, for the reputation of Alexander, he had no other worlds to conquer. Love and the Soul Hunters is the novel on which Mrs. Craigie has been working lately. She writes us that she also has in mind a serial story for harpers and a play. The novelist is described as a slender woman, not very tall, but very well built. Her face, eyes, and hair are dark, and she has a wonderful sort of personal magnetism which her friends believe would have served her well had she gone on the stage. She has occasionally gone to a convent to write, for her temperament demands tranquility. When in London she writes in the library, which is on the first floor of the Richard's house. In the summer most of her work is done at Steep Hill Castle, Isle of White. She sits for hours ruminating on her plots, then she writes rapidly, accurately. Literally she transfers the story chapter by chapter from her mind to the paper on the table before her. In society she is said to have been admired, mostly for her intellectual charms, since her school days. Although not robust in health, she generally spends the winter in the south of Europe or in Egypt, she does an amount of work that quite nullifies the effect of her remark to Mr. Archer, real conversations in the critic, that, in all our speculations upon the differences of faculty in the two sexes, we are rather apt to forget the effect of the fundamental difference in mere bodily power of endurance. End of Chapter 14 Famous Books by Edward Francis Harkins Chapter 15 Lillian Bell Lillian Bell, Mrs. Arthur Hoyt Bogue, may justly take pride in her originality and her enthusiasm. She is one of the most forceful figures in American literature. What she writes is as far from conventionality as the sun is distant from the earth. She is young and, like every other original and enthusiastic person, she has her faults, faults technical as well as temperamental. But we must credit her with the purpose of living to learn and though, as in her best work, the expatriates, there is some dross mingled with the gold, the dross will all be smelted out some day. Then she will move a round higher on the ladder. Her writings largely reflect her own experiences and her own opinions. For instance, two years ago in Boston, speaking of the United States Army, she said, The men are splendidly brave, intelligent and efficient so far as the little force goes. But the menant and army officer gets away from the barracks he puts on civilian's dress and that, to my mind, is entirely wrong. There ought to be a rule compelling officers and men in our army to wear their uniforms at all times. This would keep the army in the people's minds and make them realize that it is a real thing and a part of the nation that they can be proud of. You never see army officers on the streets or in public places in uniform. They act as if they were ashamed of it. I am proud of our army and I think we ought to make more of it than we do. If I were a man, there'd be no other career on earth for me. My brother is an officer and it is the delight of my heart that he is permanently in the service and employed in the defense of my beautiful America and that he will live his whole life under the shadow of the flag. Her brother, to whom by the way her latest story, Sir John and the American Girl is dedicated, is a lieutenant in the 17th Infantry, USA, now stationed in the Philippines. Rose Hollenden expresses virtually the same sentiments in The Expatriots. Indeed, in that singularly interesting and strangely abused novel, you will find many traces of the author's experiences and opinions. You may remember the episode at the reception given by the American ambassador to France, Mr. Sharp. But suddenly, Rose saw the tall bent figure of the American ambassador approaching. As he neared the Marquis de Tel, she turned from Prince Orloff and, mistaking Mr. Sharp for a servant, she said in a distinct tone which everybody heard. Garçon called the carriage of the Marquis de Tel. The incident took us back to what Lillian Bell had said in an interview long before the publication of the book. When she was at work on it, no doubt that our ambassadors ought to have a uniform or some sort of dress to distinguish them from the common herd. Superficially, the sentiment is not democratic, but it was the author's sense of dignity that spoke. She related how she attended an important ball at the French capital. The ambassadors from other nations appeared in splendid uniforms. They looked like somebodies. Even little Portugal and Brazil and Peru and Mexico were represented by men who kept up the dignity and the importance of their states. While the ambassador of the United States could not be told from the waiters, except that they were better dressed. It is outrageous, no wonder they despise us abroad. Times have changed, and European tempers too, we may be permitted to remark. But a comparison of Mrs. Vogue's writings and sayings is forced upon the critic who would do justice to her work, and as much as it generally shows her to be consistent. We sincerely believe that she is a woman who practices what she preaches. She is not frivolous and imaginative. She is decidedly serious and intellectual. She inherits her lively patriotism. Her father, Major William W. Bell, served his country gallantly during the Civil War, and so did her grandfather, General Joseph Warren Bell, who, though a Southerner, sold and freed his slaves before the war, brought his family north and organized the 13th Illinois Cavalry. Among the Virginian patriots at the time of the Revolution was her great-great-grandfather, Captain Thomas Bell. Lillian Bell was born in Chicago in 1867, but she was brought up in Atlanta. At an early age she took pleasure in writing. She once said, I wrote my first story at the age of eight. Later when I was in school there was a certain girl whom I loved and still loved devotedly. She so detested writing essays that she would let her general average drop 20 percent, for she always got zero for being unprepared. She was older than I by two years, but a little might of a thing, and I worshiped her so much that I used to write the essays for her. Usually I'd ask her about two hours before they had to be handed in. Written your essay? No, she couldn't write it. What's your subject? Then I would write it for her, and I used to take the keenest enjoyment in writing it, as she would have written it, and looking at it from her point of view and making the thing sound like her. It used to be a source of great glee to me that I could get her a hundred every time, though I couldn't always get that much for myself. They marked according to supposed ability. Later I wrote various novels of interminably long chapters and read them to four or five wondering girls who used to come to my house Fridays to stay over Sunday. No, those were never published. My mother burned them together with a voluminous diary I thought I was keeping. She's been ever so good to me in heaps of ways. Still later I began writing for a newspaper. I was getting the magnificent sum of eight dollars a column, and wasn't spending a cent of it, just saving it to look at. One day an old friend said to me, Are you writing much now? I said yes, and every line I'd write gets printed. That's too bad, said he, I'm very sorry. Why, what do you mean, said I? If everything you write gets printed it shows you're not advancing. That was startling. I stopped writing entirely after that and read. Oh, how I devoured books and magazines, trying to see how people that could write did things. Trying to get hold of the elements of style. Trying, in short, to master English. I began to write things and sent them out, and they always came back promptly. I didn't care. I sent them out again and kept on writing. One day an idea for a story occurred to me, and I wrote The Heart of Briar Rose, and sent it to the Harper's, who accepted it and asked for more. Soon after that I wrote The Love Affairs, and sent that to them. They accepted it, and since then everything I've written has been engaged beforehand. But don't imagine I work by contract. I never could and never will engage to do a certain piece of work in a given time. There's merely an understanding that if I write a story and send it along they'll take it. Zola himself could not desire a more flattering arrangement. Mrs. Bogue was 26 when, in 1893, The Love Affairs of an Old Maid was published. Her wit was green then, but her uncommon sense of humor was ripe. She is too serious, too objective to be a first-water humorist, nor has she ever had a desire to be one we understand. A Chicago writer has given us a story illustrating Lillian Bell's characteristic sense of humor. It seems that soon after her graduation from Dearborn's Seminary, Chicago, she was invited to read an essay on literary women of Germany in the Middle Ages at an alumni entertainment. Lillian discovered a scarcity of material and she so reported. Very well, Miss Bell, I see you do not care to accommodate me, said the principal. I shall have to disappoint our guests. No, no, protested the young graduate. If you insist upon it, I will do the best I can. The story goes on. So Miss Bell wrote a most remarkable account of the literary women of Germany in the Middle Ages. There was a score of them, all of surprising brilliancy. They guided not only the culture of the country but the politics and the social life of the court. Nothing of importance happened without their participation. The most renowned of the group after passing through all sorts of adventures, jumped through an open window, wore stories up, attempting to descend safely by using her umbrella as a parachute. The parachute failed to work. She was dashed to bits and the miserable prince whose attentions had driven her to the fatal step, went away to war, threw himself in the forefront of the battle and was killed. At judicious intervals in her essay, Miss Bell inserted the names and meager history of three literary women who had really existed. The composition was a great success. All the cultured guests, many of them members of Chicago's literary set, commended its erudition and its dramatic interest. I knew you could give us something good if you only tried, my dear," said the Lady Principal, all smiles. Miss Bell then coolly announced that she had been trying her hand at romance in the absence of facts. Every book, that is, every real book, says Mrs. Bogue, has in it something which the writer could not have helped putting into it and which no one else could have put into it by main strength. One of the things I have cared about particularly is to be an individual, not a member of a group or of a class. I think it is more worthwhile if your work is a thing of its own kind, if in it you are yourself instead of being merely a woman who has done good work in common with others along a certain line. I'd rather elude classification. I should hate to be pigeonholed. Yet some critics have had the poor judgment to classify her as a writer of light fiction and of summer literature. The reader will find an excellent example of her vehement satire in the description in The Expatriots of the concert aboard the St. Louis. There is a moral as well as fun in the discomforture of the Americans that could not seeing the star-spangled banner. It is queer, remarks the novelist in discussing her work, how differently books write themselves. The first chapter of the Love Affairs is exactly like the first draft. It suited me. The first chapter of A Little Sister to the Wilderness was written 32 times. That is the only one of my books that has been written from the outside and it was the hardest to write. For other good reasons I'll never write another book except from the inside. Nobody has ever yet found out what I wrote the underside of things for, not even a single critic. I don't believe anybody ever will either. Probably I did not make it plain enough. In regard to her daily work, Mrs. Bogue writes us, I work every morning and generally manage to read one book a day, biographies and books of philosophy which I often reread if they throw a particular light on characters. In my writing I am not so rapid. I sometimes rewrite a paragraph or chapter 20 or more times. She spent two years on The Expatriates, her most noteworthy book, visiting Europe twice during that time and reviewing her work with men and women of trustworthy judgment. The white heat I am accused of, she says, was sober morning judgment and the purest of motives to instruct an American public distinguished by its ignorance of the subjects of which I wrote. In May 1900, Lillian Bell's marriage to Mr. Arthur Hoyt Bogue of Chicago gave rise to many a joke. The jokers were especially delighted to quote the blistering witticisms in From a Girl's Point of View. Here is a specimen of the comments that went the rounds of the press. In From a Girl's Point of View, Ms. Bell deplores and ridicules the man under 35. She calls him raw, crude, uninformed, untrained, egotistical, and other uncomplementary names. The fact that Mr. Bogue is several years under 35 gives her views added pecancy. A short time ago, Mr. and Mrs. Bogue moved to New York. From one who has met her we get this glimpse of the author. She is a tall, fine-looking woman with a superb carriage, though not a strong physique. And she dresses stunningly, though a mere man would discover only that she was perfectly gowned. And she is said to have glorious eyes. Lillian Bell's readings have been enjoyed west and east, north and south. And as she wrote of Rose Hollenden, so we might write of her, that she knows her own country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Seattle to Tampa. The fact that a spirit of commercialism is creeping into the old Latin or Creole Quarter of New Orleans was well exemplified by the sign that a small bootmaker who had evidently been studying the up-to-date conversational advertisements in the daily papers recently hung over his door, translated literally it read, Oh my God, shoes half-sold for fifty cents. It is, however, the old, the picturesque, and the thoroughly lazy New Orleans of which Ruth McInerney-Stewart has written. And it is with the yaller-gals, the creoles, the plantation negroes, the cunnals, and the mahas that she is thoroughly at home. It is true that she has touched upon places that have been thoroughly covered by others, for the whole theme of the southern negro and his surroundings has been well treated by George W. Cable, with his Cajians and Creoles, by Thomas Nelson Page, with Mars Shannons, devoted body servant, and his Virginian Field Bards, by Joel Chandler Harris, with his Chronicles of Brer Rabbit, Brer Bar, and the Lesser Animals, and by Virginia Frazier Boyle, with her voodoo and devil tales. But Mrs. Stewart has given us glimpses of this life that have been permeated with her own personality, and the possibilities among these archaic and most accessible people have been many. Perhaps the negro poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, of recent years, has given us better and more sympathetic songs of the plantation life, which is so rapidly disappearing, than other expositors of southern scenes and scenery. But although Mrs. Stewart has not written voluminously, those poems and short stories which have, upon rare occasions, drifted into the different newspapers and periodicals, have shown an appreciation of the curious rhythm of the plantation song and its innocent spirit and childish repetitions, which stamp them as truthful expositions of those unintellectual and simple minds that few Americans know well enough to interpret. What in truth could more faithfully exhibit the spirit of the antebellum darky than the poem called Daddy Do Funny, which only recently appeared in St. Nicholas? Old Daddy Do Funny, with his list of miseries, is a typical plantation daddy. The author of such a truly valuable addition to American folk song was bred in the very hotbed of negro superstition and voodoo worship. She was born at Avoyel Parish, Louisiana, and was the daughter of a wealthy family of planters, who had always been slaveholders and were lifelong residents of the state. In early childhood she was taken to New Orleans, where her father was in business, and there she was educated at public and private schools, and there remained until her marriage in 1879 to Alfred O. Stewart, who owned large cotton plantations in Arkansas. Of her married life she has recently informed a newspaper paragraph her, During my married life I lived on my husband's plantation in Arkansas, and most of my negro character studies have come from my association with the negroes while there. We lived right among them. There were hundreds of negroes to one white person. My Arkansas life covered about five years, from 1879 to late in 1883. Two plantations were owned by my husband, although we did not live on either of them, but in a little town nearby. And I can see the darkies now, riding in on their mules, hitching them to the mulberry trees in our yard, sitting in rows upon our front steps, resting and fooling round generally. Some old auntie would surely come walking in every morning with a battered tin pail on her arm, filled with perfectly worthless berries, gathered up by the wayside, not to sell, but to swap for just a little flower. Please, ma'am, and a pinch of butter, honey, and a couple or lumps or sugar, please, ma'am, Miss Stewart. Then there was an old uncle who used to sit silently fishing all day long in a shallow pool, with his underlip stuck out phenomenally far, even for a negroes, who, when anyone asked him, say, uncle, what's that you've got in your mouth, would reply leconically, wombs, and shut his tongue down upon his imprisoned bait again. Of her first literary endeavor, she has also said, I was never a great reader, but was more fond of people than books, though I had my favorite authors as every girl has. Still, I was not a great reader. I've always felt interested in the common folk, but never thought seriously about writing them up until after my husband's death. It was in 1887 that I first thought about writing, and in 1888 my first story was published. I sent two stories to the Harper's. It was in this way I wrote an anonymous letter to them, and in reply I received a very pleasant note from Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, who afterwards sent one of my stories to Professor Sloan of The Princeton Review, and kept one for Harper's magazine. The Princeton Review thus happened to be the first magazine to print a story for me. As to my writing dialect, I did not do it intentionally. I simply wrote dialect stories, because when I demanded of myself a story, it was the recollection of the negroes which made it possible for me to write it. I could not help writing dialect. My characters are all drawn from imagination. I have found that in writing stories, facts or bits taken from life intact hamper instead of help me. There is always a question as to the real incidence fitting naturally into a new situation. I always fancy I can see the stitches around the patch. Besides, is it not true that the real incident that suggests itself for use is apt to be attractive for its exceptional character? Hence, it is not true to life. It was noticeable in life for this very reason. When it is put into a story, since it cannot be taken with its entire commonplace setting, it loses its relative value. It's out of drawing and false. I try to devote the first half of each day to my desk, and this is my rule. My favorite work hours are those of the early morning, from about six to breakfast time. As to my favorite authors of fiction, I might name George Elliott, George Meredith, and Victor Hugo. And among our own authors, I esteem none more highly than Mary E. Wilkins and James Lane Allen. But it is difficult to select a few lights from a galaxy so brilliant that each of the score of names would be familiar to everyone. As to my literary ambitions, oh, don't ask me. I am now doing stories and am in arrears with my engagements. Since the death of her husband, Mrs. Stewart has resided in New York City, and here she has done most of her literary work. A list of her books includes Mariah's Morning, In Simpkinsville, A Golden Wedding, Carlotta's Intended, Solomon Crowe's Christmas Pockets, The Story of Babette, Sunny, and Holly and Pizzen. She's not only an indefatigable worker, but also a reader of considerable reputation. And although not a professional elocutionist or one of the modern reciters, interprets her own writings with great vivacity and effect. Her pictures of Louisiana life, both white and colored, are indeed the best we have. Charles Dudley Warner has said, truthful, humorous, and not seldom pathetic, but never overdrawn or sentimental. Not a little of her success in presenting them to an audience lies in her power to reproduce her characters in accent and dialect, and in such a manner that we see them as they really are. She is slender and graceful, and wears her dark brown hair, thrown softly back from her face in half pompadour style, and has the delightful accent of the Southland. Her hobby is to study mycology, and each year she finds several months' pleasure in the difficult pursuit of the one-legged mushroom. She is likewise engaged in the collection of Aboriginal baskets, which represent the feelings of both art and utility of half-civilized peoples in various parts of the world. A great many paragraphs have been pleased to comment upon her as being a normal domestic woman, which is indeed what she really is, as she is an excellent housekeeper and likes to dabble in cookery and other arts of the household. Perhaps she has written nothing more thoroughly coon than Uncle Effie's advice to Brer Rabbit, which faithfully demonstrates her ability as a chronicler of plantation echoes, and well exemplifies the poetic mind of the dense, but tuneful Negro of the cotton field and the cane break. The lilt of hoppet lipet bullfrog gait hoppet lipet lipet hoppet goodness me why don't you stop it. Hasn't it the onamana poetic quality of genuine barbaric verse? Mrs. Stewart's self-confessed lack of bookish traits is perhaps one secret of her success in her own field. She is versed in the study of the simple characters into whose lives she has so fully entered as no student of mere letters could be. The author of Sunny and the Simkinsville Stories well deserves her creditable rank among the American writers of genre fiction. End of Chapter 16