The purpose of this book is to renew an intimate acquaintance with the women whom the American reading public regards as favourites, and to establish alike intimate acquaintance with the promising newcomers. The story writers included in the list represent all sections of the country, but this circumstance is quite accidental. Although it happily suits the scheme of the book, it stands, first of all, as a proof that the women whom the reading public honours are the products of many cities and of widely differing environments. There's been no hesitation about including a resident of England, Mrs. Craigie, John Oliver Hobbs in the list, for she was born in America and loves no other land so deeply, nor have such favourites as Frances Hodgson Burnett and Amelia E. Barr been excluded, for although of foreign birth they have long considered themselves Americans. On the other hand, the fact that the book deals with the writers of stories, long and short, and not with poets, has necessitated the exclusion of favourites like Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton. The sketches are partly critical and partly biographical. They are the result of efforts to inform as well as to entertain. To many members of this gifted company, the authors of Little Pilgrimages owe thanks for much new and valuable information and for numerous other courtesies extended during the preparation of the volume. End of preface. Chapter 1 Elizabeth Stewart Phelps Ward A stranger who came from some far western village and was making a first visit to Boston is set to have thus addressed the bartender of an exclusive hotel. Excuse me, but I am a stranger in this part of the country and I want to ask you a question. Everywhere I go I see posters up like this, the gates ajar, the gates ajar. I'm sick to death of the sight of the darn thing. I haven't dars to ask what it is. Do tell, a feller. Is it a new kind of drink? Much indeed may be called true, though unsolicited, fame, and such was the popularity of Mrs. Ward's first novel of any pretensions, a popularity which returned to sale of nearly one hundred thousand copies in America and was outrun by that in Great Britain. This, when compared with the enormous issues of popular fiction of the present day, does not of course seem extraordinary, but at the moment, 1869, it was an almost unprecedented literary triumph. Translations were manifold. In France, Germany, Holland, and Italy they appeared, yet, from the inadequate copyright laws which then existed in this country, the just and honest rewards which were due the brilliant author were never received. Perhaps the most interesting edition of the book was a sickly yellow thing, says Mrs. Ward, covered with a canvas design of some kind, in which the wings of a particularly sprawly angel predominate. The print is abhorrent, and the paper such, as any respectable publisher, would deserve to be condemned for in this world and in that to come. In fact, the entire book was thus given out by one of the most enterprising of English literary pirates as an advertisement for a patent medicine. I have never traced the chemical history of the drug, but it has pleased my fancy to suppose it to be the one in which Mrs. Holt, the mother of Felix, dealt so largely, and whose sales Felix put forth his mighty conscience to suppress. Previous to the appearance of this study of life, actual and eternal, the existence of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps had indeed been a busy and intellectual one, yet similar to that of many a New England girl whose parents were of superior moral and intellectual fiber. It was the instinctive and inborn spark of genius which prompted the daughter of a hard-worked and overburden New England professor to pen a work at twenty years of age which showed a depth of insight and sympathy with the sorrows of life of one of twice her experience. She was born in Andover, Massachusetts, on August 31st, 1841, and inherited the keenest and most artistic literary talent from both her parents. Although everybody's mother is a remarkable woman, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the mother, was a reconciliation of tact and power between genius and domestic life, a similar representation of which is seldom met with. A devoted, affectionate guardian and worthy advisor, she still found time to pen a number of stories for other people's children, which gave her a wider audience than that of her own hearth, and one that clamored with greater eagerness for further productions of her delicate imagination. The author of Sunny Side, The Angel on the Right Shoulder, and Peeps at Number Five was a rare woman of great intellectual gifts, who did not allow the keen pleasure of writing to overbalance the stern duties of motherhood. Austen Phelps, the father, was professor of rhetoric in the theological seminary, a man of broad sympathies and with literary gifts of marked power. His still hour is yet read, while his Andover lectures, which in book form have become classics, stand without peers today and are the accepted textbooks of his department. His appreciation of the uses and graces of language very early descended like a mantel upon the shoulders of his daughter. She learned to love reading, not because she was made to, but because she could not help it. The atmosphere she breathed was that of literature, and only that of the best. At the age of thirteen her first literary effort was sent to the youth's companion, and was accepted. At the time she was a rather small, angular person, usually attired in a high-necked gingham dress, not in the least precocious, and very much of a tomboy into the bargain. Far more likely, in fact, to be found on top of an apple-tree or walking the length of the seminary fence than writing rhymes or reading solid reading. The story was about a sister who neglected her small brother, and hence defeated the first object of existence in a woman-child. It was very proper, very pious, and very much like what well-brought-up little girls were taught to do, to be, to suffer, or to write in those days. For this effort the paper which had printed her contribution appeared in the Andover postbox for a year, and addressed to the writer of the published semi-column. The stimulating influences within the great White House, with its intellectual inmates, and the very atmosphere of Andover itself, were not long in fostering renewed desires for literary triumphs. The country was soon upon the eve of a great conflict, and the fierce eddying tide in Virginia caught with it many of the fair young forms intimate with the peaceful village life. The departure of friends and acquaintances in their rough clothes of blue made a great impression upon the receptive mind of the timid girl, and her own feelings of sorrow, wherewith a knowledge of the mental sufferings of others who remained at home soon found voice in what might justly be called her first literary venture, a story of the war which appeared in Harper's Magazine, and for which she received a check for twenty-five dollars. This was in January, 1864, and its name a sacrifice consumed. The narrative was of a poor and plain little dressmaker who lost her lover in the army. It was a simple tale, but full of that delicate and sympathetic appreciation of womanly sorrow which Mrs. Ward is able to portray with greater truthfulness, perhaps, than any living American author. Her father read it in printed form, she had not shown it to him before, and his genuine emotion gave her a kind of odd elation which has never been repeated in her experience. She now was launched upon the sea of literary venture, and wrote with a distinct purpose and quite steadily, contributing stories of various lengths to the different magazines with marked success, although she herself confesses that, had her first contribution been refused, or even the second, or the third, she would not have written again. Discovering soon enough that one cannot live by bread, or by magazine stories alone, like many another who toils in the ways of this most unremunerative of all professions, she did hack work and Sunday school books by the score. The appearance of a little story called The Tenth of January which was founded upon the wreck of the Pemberton Mills at Lawrence, and upon which she spent nearly a month of preparation, distinctly marked the first recognition she received from literary people. The catastrophe upon which this sketch was founded had indeed been a terrible one. At five o'clock one January afternoon when all hands were upon duty, the roof, the walls, and machinery of a great building, crowded with working men and women, had given way and fallen with crushing weight upon the bodies of seven hundred living human beings. Fire, fierce and uncontrollable, had added to the horror, and the plight of the poor working girls who, caught within the ruins beyond all hope of escape, went to their death with the songs of those hymns they had learned at church upon their lips, made an impression, not only upon the author but upon all who had seen and heard, which was as indelible as a mark upon marble the ears alone can erase. For the best part of a month she investigated every avenue of information which might throw some light upon the tragedy, even to consulting engineers, physicians, officers, and newspaper men, and making a complete study of all files of local newspapers with articles bearing upon the tragedy, so that whatever she had to say would be from the fullest and most complete knowledge. Then the story was written. After its perusal the poet Whittier wrote her his first letter, and said enough to keep the courage of the youthful aspirant to literary fame, a letter which to a self-distrustful nature like her own was as stimulating as a life-preserving tonic. The inspiration for her next book, The Gates a Jar, came spontaneously. The angel in her said, right, and she wrote. She says, the book grew so naturally it was so unpremeditated it came so plainly from the something not oneself which makes for uses in which oneself is extinguished, that there are times when it seems to me as if I had no more to do with the riding of it than the bow through which the wind cries or the wave by means of which the tide rises. Its composition consumed the greater part of two years, years when the country was permeated with the spirit of a general grief. The regiments were returning with depleted ranks, the streets were dark with sorrowing women, the gayest scenes were black with crepe, in truth a world of woe into which her book stole forth trembling.  The success of her efforts was marvellous, although a storm of criticism was called forth both favourable and unfavourable to the spirit that dared to produce a conception of the future life which was foreign to all preconceived ideas. From the time of its publication to the present day Mrs. Ward has conversed through the medium of her many works to an ever appreciative and enlarging audience. With her writing there is a distinct moral purpose, so that it does not appeal, perhaps, to some critics who hold fast to the belief that nothing is worthy of high praise unless it is written for art's sake alone. This idea she has always sacrificed to the moral influence with which it was her earnest desire to impregnate the pages of whatever story she is endeavored to tell. For her every production has been with the idea of helping those who read. She believes the old rhetorical law that a high and noble subject should be more worthy of a high and noble medium of art than a low one, and that it is not necessarily inartistic to do a good and helpful thing, provided the medium through which it reaches others is not wholly and distinctly bad. In 1888 she was married to the Reverend Herbert D. Ward, with whom two of her more recent novels have been written. They are The Master of the Magicians and Come Forth. Perhaps her most popular production, at the present time of writing, is A Singular Life, published in 1896, but that which she regards as her most important work, the story of Jesus Christ, was published in the fall of 1897. These have, for the most part, been written in an unpretentious but attractive house at Newton's Center, whereas her winter home. In summer she has for many years been an ever welcome and appreciative visitant of Eastern Point Gloucester, where her work, in favor of the great cause of temperance among the fisherfolk of the seafaring town nearby, has greatly endeared her to the native-born and stimulated them with a love and respect to that is universal and sincere. Her story of Jack, a young fisherman who ruined his life and met his death through her drink, is perhaps one of the best appeals for temperance that has yet appeared. At present she is much interested in the anti-vivisection movement and is spending much time and energy in its behalf. As a literary artist of the most successful type, who can well speak with a tone of authority, it is of importance and great interest to learn her views and comments upon those who contemplate a literary career. Right if you must, not otherwise, she says, do not write if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hot-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole, nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living. Do anything honest, but do not write, unless God called you and publishers want you and people read you and editors claim you. Respect the market laws, lean on nobody. Trust the common sense of an experienced publisher to know whether your manuscript is worth something or nothing. Do not depend on influence. Editors do not care a drop of ink for influence. What they want is good material, and the fresher it is, the better. An editor will pass by on an old writer any day for an unknown and gifted new one, with power to say a good thing in a fresh way. Make your calling and election sure. Do not flirt with your pen. Emerson's phrase was, toiling terribly. Nothing less will hint at the grinding drudgery of a life spent in living by your brains. CHAPTER II Francis Hodgson Burnett By the name of Francis Hodgson Burnett she is still known, although early in 1900 in Genoa, Italy, she became Mrs. Stephen Townsend. Generally too she is thought of as an American, while as a matter of fact she is English by birth. However, during the greater part of her life she has been an American in sympathy as well as in residence. It is America which has awarded her the highest praise as a woman and the hardiest applause as an author. It is American incidents which constitute the subject of her most ambitious novel. It was at an American university that her son Vivian was educated, and numerous other ties have made her sufficiently American to warrant giving her a place in this book. As a writer said a few years ago, Americans regard Mrs. Burnett as a countrywoman. Mrs. Burnett was born in Manchester, England, on November 24, 1849. Her father, who was a well-to-do merchant, died when she was ten years old, and not long after the father's death the Hodgson's moved to Tennessee, with her and uncle of Francis had preceded them. But even before leaving England the little girl's remarkable powers of observation had been put into practice. The story goes, the English home of the Hodgson's was in Eilinton Square, and in the rear of it, at the end of the yard, was an alley on which were the homes of working people. Through the bars of an iron gate, as a little child, Francis watched the people who lived in the alley. One day, when the little Hodgson girl was only nine years old, she saw the face of the girl whom she afterwards called That Last O'Louries. She saw the last only twice. Once the little thing was in the midst of a group of children knitting away and moving among them with an authoritative air. The second time The Last was retreating home, proudly yet obediently, before a coarse and brutal father. Upon reaching America the Hodgson settled in Knoxville, but the war of the rebellion ruined the uncle's business, and so the mother gathered her two sons and three daughters about her and went to live in a log cabin in the country. At that time Francis, according to a friend who was known her from childhood, was a bright girl of fourteen who had been carefully educated in a private school, was thoroughly grounded in her English studies, spoke French fluently, and was a good musician. This same friend, by the way, assures us that Francis was able to read by the time she was three years old, and before she was five she was writing little stories in her copy book. She produced the greatest quantity of this sort of literature before she was twelve, but when it was decided that they were to come to America, Francis, with the courage of a Spartan, made a holocaust of the small library. The misery into which the Hodgson's were thrown, first by an unprofitable settlement of the father's estate, and afterwards by the adversity of the uncle, acted as a heavy strain upon Mrs. Hodgson, who, the daughter of a cotton manufacturer of large means, had been reared in luxury, and at the end of a few years the strain proved her death. But meantime the children took up hard work enthusiastically. Francis got a position as a schoolteacher. The parents of the children whom she taught paid her in eggs, flour, bacon, potatoes, and other country produce, and on this primitive kind of salary the family subsisted. They were not an unhappy family even then, says a witness of their struggles, though the boys had to undertake work of a humble and laborious sort, and their whole existence was one of dire toil and deprivation. They were jolly young people who, when work was over, had concerts together, each playing a different instrument, and all of them were fond of books, of which they managed by hook or by crook to possess themselves. Francis's hobby was story-writing, to quote what an intimate acquaintance of the author wrote when Mrs. Burnett first moved to Washington. We can well imagine no day dreary and no evening long in that household, a circle which in later years has become familiar through her pen as vagabondia. The first essay at a story that might go beyond the approving audience of vagabondia was attempted in her thirteenth year, written and read, not told, to her two sisters when she was nearly fifteen. Edas, the younger member of the household, saw practical financial results in this production, and promptly advised sending it where such things were paid for. The young author was startled at the proposal, though doubtless her mind had already awakened to the possibilities of a future success, if not fame. The only difficulty, to the younger sister's mind, seemed to be postage stamps. Neither had the nerve to ask the head of the family, the elder brother, for the few pennies, lest the shy maiden in her aspirations should become the subject of ridicule. The difficulty was overcome by the Betsy Trotwood of the family, as Edas was significantly called, who proposed that they should gather a basket of wild grapes from a neighboring wood, and the lucre thereby obtained should be used to send the precious manuscript to Baloo's magazine. And to that basket, we may remark, hangs a romantic tale. But first let the other story go on. The answer was gratifying and complementary, but the offer was to publish the story without remuneration. It was far more than the young writer had expected, but it was not satisfactory to Trotwood, who sain'tually remarked that, if it was worth praising, it was worth paying for. So by request it was returned. Then it was sent to Godi's lady's book, whose editor not only accepted it, but also several other manuscripts, on fair terms, thereby having the distinction of first giving encouragement to a pen that has won a world-wide recognition.  Mr. Peterson not only was publisher, but became an interested personal friend. To him, more than to anyone else, she feels indebted for the encouragement that induced her to continue in the arduous work. As Mrs. Burnett was trapped, we use the expression advisedly, for she seldom unearthed the past, into a reminiscent mood, and she gave virtually the same version of her first experience with publishers. The story was Miss Carruthers' Engagement. Mr. Belue said it was a good story, but that he could not afford to pay for it, so at the author's request he returned it. Finally it reached Godi's. Their readers, says Mrs. Burnett, doubted its originality, and Mr. Godi wrote me that he liked the story, and if I could prove that it was original he would pay me twenty dollars for it, and that I might set about writing another at once. I wrote in reply, showing them that the story was undoubtedly my own, and to prove it sent them another, called Hearts and Diamonds, and for the two I got thirty-five dollars. Do you remember your sensations on seeing your first story in print, Mrs. Burnett was asked? Yes, I can, she answered. I know I read the story over and over again, and it seemed much more interesting and better than it did in the manuscript. The money I got seemed to be a great deal, and I felt that my vocation in life was fixed, and indeed I have been writing from that day to this. The old files have been ill-kept, and we have not been able to trace the author's career back farther than a story called Ethel Sir Lancelot, which appeared in Peterson's in November, 1868. The acceptance of Miss Carruthers' engagement and Hearts and Diamonds certainly did fix their author's vocation, as the reading world knows, but let us go back to the basket of fruit that the Hodgson sisters picked that memorable day. The fruit was sold to the mother of a young man named Burnett, Swan Moses Burnett, to which young man, in 1873, after he had taken his degree as Doctor of Medicine, Francis Eliza Hodgson was married. He was twice Miss Hodgson's age. It is said that in Mrs. Burnett's La Solaurie's may be found a spiritual description of him as he first appeared to her. The hero with the crippled arm was in real life so crippled that he was obliged to walk with one knee stiffened using the toe of his foot to step upon. His face, while having somewhat of the painful expression of a physical sufferer, possessed in a high degree the beauty of intelligence. Its expression was sensitive, sympathetic, and above all intellectual. All these qualities distinguished the young man. Observation was habitual with him, and at first he became interested in the girl merely out of curiosity. He attracted him even more by her brightness than by her prettiness. They were married in 1873, and divorced in 1898. They had two children, Lionel, who died in Paris ten years ago of consumption, and Vivian, who is the subject of his mother's most popular story, Little Lord Fauntleroy. It is a curious circumstance that the petition for the divorce of the Burnettes was filed the day Vivian came of age. Yet the doctor, who, by the way, is a celebrated eye specialist, and his gifted wife, were uncommonly devoted to each other in the early days of their romance, as we shall see. After Francis's literary vow the Hodgson's prospered. They were able soon to move into a pretty vine-covered house, which, at the young author's suggestion, they significantly called Mount Errorat. Just after Francis's engagement to Dr. Burnette Mrs. Hodgson died, and for some time literature and domestic economy were in each other's way. But one of the Hodgson boys married a sister of Dr. Burnette, and, relieved of her new burden, Francis, already well known as the author of Surly Tim's Troubles, Scribner's, 1872, visited England. Upon her return, she and the ambitious young doctor were made husband and wife. But of what avail was his ambition without the means of satisfying it? So his wife, in little more than one year, wrote three novels. Then the Burnettes, Lionel had been born, moved to Paris. There Vivian the second son was born. When the doctor had completed his studies the family came back to this country and settled down in Washington. Where Dr. Burnette still lives. He is spoken of by his friends as a kind and brilliant man. That last salouries was planned during Mrs. Burnette's visit to Manchester, just before her marriage, and was published in 1877. So discriminating a critic as Richard Grant White referred to the story as the flower and crown of all recent fiction. That and Pretty Polly Pemberton and The Fire at Grantley Mills were the tales which met the expenses of the journey to Paris. One of her novels, A Fair Barbarian, was the first work of an American romances to receive the compliment of publication in the century after it had been published in another magazine, Peterson's. The success of little Lord Fauntleroy, by far the most popular of the author's works, and in truth one of the most popular bits of fiction ever written, has barely faded, though it was achieved in 1886. The dramatization of the story alone brought Mrs. Burnette a handsome fortune. It was the talk of the literary world when the graduate of the Tennessee Log Cabin bought herself a palatial house on Massachusetts Avenue, Washington. The success of A Lady of Quality, both as a novel and as a play, added another heap to the novelist's gold. And then she took a house in Portland Place, London, and a magnificent country seat, Mason Hall, Rovendon, Kent. She and Mr. Townsend collaborated in the dramatization of A Lady of Quality. Mr. Townsend is also the author of a novel, A Thoroughbred Mongrel. Up to date Mrs. Burnette's, or Mrs. Townsend's, great disappointment has been the comparative failure of the De Willeby claim. I now look upon it, she said, before it was published a couple of years ago, as my greatest work and what I hope to make the great American novel. It was brushed aside by greater American novels, and some of Mrs. Burnette's oldest friends among the critics scolded her for it. Mrs. Burnette's new book, The Making of a Marchioness, appears too late for our criticism. We understand that the author is at work on two other novels, at least one of which will be published next year. Hard mental works, as one who saw her lately, has not left marks with Mrs. Burnette. She is as rosy and young-looking as she was fifteen years ago, with the same tawny hair and the same baby-like eyes. Rosy then, and young-looking still, rich, happy and a newfound love, somewhat eccentric, enjoying praise. Such is Mrs. Burnette today. CHAPTER III Sarah Orrne-Jewitt Once upon a time some critic found a resemblance between Miss Jewitt and one of the old Flemish painters, found a resemblance between her stories and the groups of Jan von Eich or Roger van der Weyden. He was a discerning critic, for her stories and the old master's pictures are alike in many respects. They have a reality that is quite photographic, and yet they suggest a strong imagination. Their purity is remarkable, and yet their atmosphere is very earthly. Better still, however, it seems to us, it would be to say that there is a strong resemblance between Miss Jewitt and Jean François Mied. They both have dignified the meek and the lowly. They both have exhibited the tenderest sympathy with the plain sons of Adam and Eve that live far from the madding crowd. They both have done this noble and ennobling work enthusiastically yet unaffectedly. Modestly, but ah, how artistically! They that take pleasure in the Angelus will take pleasure also in Deep Haven. Mied, too, knew his characters intimately. He had struggled and suffered like them. From such painful strenuousness Miss Jewitt, fortunately, has been able to keep aloof, for Barbizon is not like South Berwick, and the French peasants would say that the country folk of Maine lived royally. But we have heard it said that Miss Jewitt is like her books, and that in ten minutes she unconsciously tells you how she writes them. Kate Sandborn once essayed a description of her friend in contemporary in which she observed, I feel a certain shrinking from attempting a personal sketch of this gifted woman whom we all love for her absolutely perfect pictures of New England life. Anyone who essays the description must feel as Kate Sandborn felt, and yet, in such a case, a sketch poorly or inadequately done is better than no sketch at all. The lesson will be present, if not the eloquence. The old Flemish painters made portraits of themselves, but as yet we hardly need say Miss Jewitt has given us no sketch of herself. Sarah Orn Jewitt was born at South Berwick, Maine, on September 3, 1849. Her father was Dr. Theodore Hermann Jewitt, a physician of no small renown. Her mother was the daughter of Dr. Perry of Exeter, another physician well known in Central New England during the middle of the last century. The house in which she was born is still standing, although it was built far back in the eighteenth century, and it still excites the author's warmest affection. I was born here, she said, as she stood in its paneled hall a few years ago, and I hope to die here, leaving the lilac bushes still green and growing and all the chairs in their places. You will meet glimpses of Miss Jewitt's father in a country doctor, but the nearest and clearest glimpse is in his daughter's personal sketch of him. My father had inherited from his father an amazing knowledge of human nature, and from his mother's French ancestry that peculiarly French trait called gaité de coeur. Through all the heavy responsibilities and anxieties of his busy professional life, this kept him young at heart and cheerful. His visits to his patients were often made delightful and refreshing to them by his kind heart and the charm of his personality. I knew many of the patients whom he used to visit in lonely inland farms or on the sea coast in York and Wells. I used to follow him about silently like an undemanding little dog, content to follow at his heels. I had no consciousness of watching or listening or indeed of any special interest in the country interiors. In fact, when the time came that my own world of imagination was more real to me than any other, I was sometimes perplexed at my father's directing my attention to certain points of interest in the characters or surroundings of our acquaintances. I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself, in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now, as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the wise things he said and the sights he made me see. He was impatient only with affectation and insincerity. Miss Jewett was a delicate child, and consequently was encouraged by her father to spend much of her time outdoors, and outdoors she formed her extraordinarily intimate acquaintance with nature and with the inhabitants of the Agamenticus region. She played even more eagerly than did the other children of the town, but when she went to school she readily outstripped her classmates. It is said that at the academy she found verse easy and prose difficult. But such conditions are not unusual. Truth takes naturally to rhymes and to games. Once someone inquired of the author of A Country Doctor when the literary bent took possession of her. I can scarcely say anything about that, she answered, for I began to write so early. But my first serious encouragement was the acceptance of a short story by the Atlantic monthly when I was between nineteen and twenty years old. That story was Mr. Bruce, published in December, eighteen sixty-nine. We believe that Miss Jewett was about fourteen when she wrote Lucy Garen's Lovers. Between that age and the age when she was welcomed to the Atlantic monthly she published little sketches in young folks and in the Riverside. Her first great popular success was Deep Haven, which appeared in eighteen seventy-seven. Her success, however, hardly expresses the reception of Deep Haven. Artistic success might be a fitter expression. The fact is, Miss Jewett's works are not popular, as Miss Johnston's say are popular. James Russell Lowell used the right words when, shortly before his death, he wrote to the London publishers of the New England author's books. I am very glad to hear that Miss Jewett's delightful stories are to be reprinted in England. Being more pleasingly characteristic of rural life in New England has been written, and they have long been valued by the judicious here. The same might be said today. They have long been valued by the judicious here. No writer has a more devoted, more admiring public than the Bostonian. For we may call her a Bostonian, not withstanding her loyalty to Barrick, or Barrick as the natives say. During the last quarter of a century she has been the almost inseparable companion of Mrs. James T. Fields, who loves Boston no less than the judicious Bostonians love and respect her. Back in 1882 the serene and noble Whittier addressed a sonnet to them as they set sail for Europe. A sonnet interesting to quote. Outbound, your bark awaits you. Were I one whose prayer availeth much my wish would be your favouring trade wind and consenting sea? By sail or steed was never love outrun. And here or there, love follows her in whom all graces and sweet charities unite. The old Greek beauty set in holier light, and her for whom New England's byways bloom, who walks among us welcome as the spring, calling up blossoms where her light feet stray. God keep you both, make beautiful your way. Hurt, console, and bless, and safely bring, ere yet I wake upon a vaster sea, the unreturning voyage, my friends to me. Whittier was accustomed to attend friends meetings in Barrick, and it was in the old town that he, typical of the old New England literary traditions, and Miss Jewett, the type of the newer, made each other's acquaintance. The sweet poet was greatly pleased by Deep Haven, and he heartily interested himself in its writer's progress until he died. Miss Jewett divides her time between Boston, Barrick, and Manchester by the sea, the same Manchester that prompted Dr. Holmes to write, Beverly by the Depot. The larger part of her literary work is done in the old main settlement. To whose name, by the way, no south was prefixed originally. Plain Barrick it was known, as in the lively, picturesque days when bronze-faced sailors rolled barrels of rum up and boxes of tobacco and stranger wares down the North Atlantic wharves. From one who visited her in Maine a few years ago, we gather this description of the Jewett homestead. It seems as if one had no right to say so much about a house, which is a home. And yet New England has few like this, and it is a part of her brave history. There are few such broad, high halls, arched and paneled, few such wide stairways with carved and polished railings, few such quaint gilded mirrors and antique portraits, and last-century bedsteads with white canopies. Behind the house is a big, old-fashioned garden, and every room is sweet with posies. There is a stable, too, for Miss Jewett loves her horses and drives almost daily over the green hills of the beautiful coast of Maine. She is an oarswoman as well, and her boat knows every reach of the river and all its quiet, sunlit groves. Miss Jewett's den is the most delightful I've ever seen. It is in the upper hall, with a window looking down upon a tree- shaded village street. A desk, strewn with papers, is on one side, and on the other, a case of books and a table. Pictures, flowers, and books are everywhere. The room set apart for the library is one of the four great square ones downstairs. But the books overflow it. They lie upon the sofas and have shelves in the bedrooms. It is the house of a woman who studies, Scott particularly. The busier I get, she said, the more time I make to read the Waverly novels. Mention of the den brings us up to Miss Jewett's method of working. She has moods. She does not make writing a set daily task, with so many pages to be done at a certain hour, as a havestraw laborer would have so many bricks. We have heard it said that sometimes her day's work amounts to eight or ten thousand words. That indeed would be a prodigious effort. Marion Crawford is one of the swiftest writers we ever heard of, and his ordinary limit is six thousand words a day. Possibly the truth about Miss Jewett's industry has been exaggerated. More reasonable is the statement that, while engaged on a novel, she pens from two to four thousand words a day. Between books she enjoys periods of physical recreation and literary construction. Of your own books, which do you like best, Miss Jewett was once asked. There are pretty large family now, and she smiled. There are always personal reasons, you know, and associations that may influence one's judgment. I don't think I have a favourite. In some ways I like a country doctor best, and yet I believe a Marsh Island is a better story. Her latest work, A Tory Lover, was concluded in the Atlantic Monthly last August, two months after Bowdoin College had bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Letters. I have only written, she said to a literary brother a few years ago, about what I knew and felt, in giving any idea of the influences which have shaped my literary life, I must go back to the surroundings of my childhood, and to those friends who first taught me to observe, and to know the deep pleasures of simple things, and to be interested in simple and humble lives. I was born in an old colonial house in South Berwick, which was built about 1750. My grandfather had been a sea captain, but retired early and engaged more or less in the flourishing shipping trade of that time. This business, in all its branches, was still in existence in my early childhood, and so I came into contact not only with the farming and up-country people, but with sailors and shipmasters and lumbermen as well. I used to linger about the country stores and listen to the shrewd and often witty country talk, and I delighted in hearing of the ships which came to port, and in seeing the sea-tanned captains, who sometimes dined with my grandfather and talked of their voyages and bargains at the Barbados in Havana. And so I came to know directly a good deal about a fashion of life which is now almost entirely a thing of the past in New England. Aren't you know, she said to the same man, as they sat discussing her Yankee and Irish-American sketches, always begins with the recognition of the grotesque and unusual in life, the mere superficial aspects of character and habit. All literature, in the beginning, is in relation to the lower forms of pictorial art. It views life from the pictorial side almost exclusively. As art goes higher it recognizes facts, and then the pathetic in the ludicrous. The distinction of modern literature is the evocation of sympathy. Plato said, The best thing that can be done for the people of a state is to make them acquainted with each other. And that is what I conceive to be the business of a story-writer. Miss Jewett is rather tall and perfectly dignified, but her dignity is warmed by her uncommon graciousness and by the charming brightness of her face. As her father had, surely she also has this true French gai-té-de-cœur. It should, by this time, be hardly necessary to say that flashes of wit and wisdom characterize her conversation, and that, in short, she is one of the rarest ornaments of the most cultured circle of Boston society. Chapter 4 of Little Pilgrimages among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books. This is a LibriVox recording. While LibriVox recordings are in the public domain, for more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Betty B. Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books by Edward Francis Harkins. Chapter 4, Mrs. Burton Harrison Anyone who has visited Virginia and is at all intimate with its country life can easily understand how the mind of a highly imaginative child would there be stimulated to the creation of fairy stories, by reasons as natural and instinctive as those which foster that early love for dolls of wood, of paper, or of plaster. Such was the beginning of Mrs. Burton Harrison's literary career, and these childish efforts were but the nucleus of other stories yet to come. Stories which were to treat of more worldly individuals than fairies, but were to retain the freshness and charm of those earlier attempts, which would make them ever pleasing to a large and enthusiastic audience of well-cultivated but critical Americans. The many beautiful and always gracious heroines of colonial Virginia life, who are at the present time absorbing so much authorial ink, have indeed a 20th century prototype in Mrs. Burton Harrison, an aristocrat in every instance of temperament as romantic as one could wish, yet not, as is usually the case, with an accompanying overbalance of unpracticality, with self-possession worthy of another century when graciousness of manner was more fully cultivated than now. She possesses a combination of characteristics which are well divided against themselves, and which permeate her work with a peculiar flavor of artistic excellence. She is of medium height and of well-rounded figure. Her hair of auburn, just escaping red, is tinged with gray. Her eyes are grayish blue and not remarkable. Her features, though fairly regular, have no particular claim to beauty. In fact, so little distinction is there in her personal appearance that the passer-by would not look a second time at the middle-aged woman in the simple attire, yet such is her mingled grace and charm of manner that to see and know is but to admire with ever-increasing appreciation. As Constance Carey of Virginia, she came of historic Anglo-Saxon blood and passed her childhood in that distinctly romantic atmosphere of semi-feudalism, which was typical of Virginia life before the war. Her colonial ancestor upon her father's side, Colonel Miles Carey, was a scion of the Careys of Devonshire England, whose tombs are yet to be seen at the church at clovely, and whose present head is the Viscount Falkland. Emigrating to America, he settled in Virginia about the middle of the 17th century, and later became a man of considerable prominence, for during the vigorous rule of Sir William Berkeley, he was a member of the King's Council. Her father was Archibald Carey of Careysbrook in Virginia, and the son of Virginia Randolph, the ward and pupil of Thomas Jefferson, and sister of his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph. Visitors to Monticello are still shown the spot where Jefferson stood in giving his ward and marriage to his own nephew. Her mother was the youngest daughter of Thomas Fairfax, Baron of Cameron in the Scottish peerage, who resided upon a large plantation at Valcluse in Fairfax, Virginia, and there lived a retired and gentlemanly life. From her grandmother upon the father's side, Mrs. Wilson Jefferson Carey, a well-known and popular writer in her day, she may be said to have inherited her literary talent, although the Fairfax family was noted for its appreciation of good literature. As a writer, her father possessed considerable originality and force, and the influence of his great-uncle, Thomas Jefferson, the founder of American democracy, is distinctly discernible in his political essays. Unfortunately, he died, while comparatively a young man, and his wife and small children lived in the seclusion of the family estate, not far from Arlington, where Constance Carey spent a happy childhood and youth, educated by her loving mother and a French governess, and delving with great constancy into the full-stocked family library of old but well-chosen books. When she was seventeen, her first story, a love story, of course, was sent to the Atlantic monthly. It was lurid and melancholy, and was returned in due course of time with. This is far better than the average, and should be read through, written in very bright ink, and with a very large hand across the front page. From this she inferred that only the first page had been read, and strange as it may seem, even that gave her encouragement. Her next attempt was a highly-colored and sensational novel called Skirmishing, which was destroyed in a fire, an event for which she has since every reason to feel grateful. The civil war now temporarily ended her literary career, for the family left felt lose at the approach of the hostile armies, and passed through the Confederate lines at Manassas to friends and acquaintances upon the southern side. Shortly afterwards their hospitable home was destroyed by the government engineers during the construction of the chain of fortifications around Washington City, which were thrown up under the direction of General McClellan. The effect of this loss of home, coupled with the other misfortunes which crowded upon Constance Cary at this period of her life, left a deep impression upon her sensitive nature. A shade of bitterness fostered by these events may be traced in some of her writings, most noticeably perhaps in Flower to Hundred and Crow's Nest, but a long trip abroad with her widowed mother and several years spent in European travel not only made her forget in part the sorrows of the past, but furthered an education which was already of unusual completeness. Soon after her return Ms. Kerry was married to Burton Harrison, Esquire, a prominent member of the New York Bar, and like his wife also of an ancient and well-known Virginia family. The ceremony was performed in the picturesque St. Anne's Church in Westchester County, New York, and the wedding breakfast was at Old Morassana, the country home of her uncle, Governor Morris. It was not until my return to America, she has said, that I was bold enough to take up my pen. I wrote a little article which I called A Little Centennial Lady. It was published in Scribner's Magazine and had so favorable a reception that I was encouraged to write Goldenrod, A Story of Mount Desert, which appeared in Harper's Magazine. These were quite widely read and were soon followed by other efforts. Two spheres of life she felt well qualified to represent, and these only she has touched upon with success, although her latest novel has been of a distinctly different type. The south of her girlhood, which she knew so intimately, she is depicted with the true sympathy of the southern born, while the whims and fallacies of that metropolitan society, where mammon worship is paramount, and mad scramble after place and leadership is all absorbing. She is shown with a delicate appreciation that is unequal. Of her own work she has said, my books I have enjoyed most, if a writer may enjoy her own work, have not been those dealing with New York social life, but my tales of the south. Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun was unconsciously responsible for my old dominion. He gave me the agreeable task of editing the Monticello letters, and from them I gleaned a story which outlined my old dominion. But the editors cry for stories of New York social life to gratify the popular demand. And is it not human nature that the public should thus raise its voice? What interests the dweller in the tenth small cottage to the left of the grocery store in the New England village, more than what the dweller in the second house to the right of that same grocery store is doing? Stories of a swell club, women's teas, and love's broken lances among the million dollar in doubt serve but to satisfy the curiosity of those who live upon a higher social, not necessarily moral, plain than that of the country town. They cry for news of each other. And Mrs. Harrison has ably satisfied this want. Hermuse is not a winged pegasus, it is a park cob. A clever New York reviewer has said, but Mrs. Harrison would have us think otherwise. I am sorry I am so identified with society in the minds of readers. I would like to be thought of as a student of human rather than of society, nature. It is circumstances that have made my outlook upon life what it is. I have an intense sympathy for the joys and sorrows of humanity. In the older I grow, the more sorrows appeal to me. I see them in the lives of my friends and write about them. The friends happen to be in society, so I am known as the society novelist or satirist. There are two homes which are graced by the presence of the successful novelist who is as competent a housekeeper as she is, a brilliant member of society. The Harrison's Winter House is a charming but unpretentious mansion on East 29th Street, New York, the city of many more palatial but few more attractive residents. Sea urchins, their summer cottage is at Bar Harbor and is most picturesquely situated upon a high bit of ground near the sea. This perhaps is her favorite working place and although she is a great traveler and has been to nearly all the noted places in foreign lands and to many which are seldom visited by the casual and unliterary tourist, yet she has confessed that her happiest hours are spent in the bracing atmosphere which surrounds this northern dwelling. Her first story of New York life, Helen Troy, in 1881, was a tale of the society of her native town and of the Berkshire Hills. The Old Fashioned Fairy Book, published in 1884 and Brickabrack Stories, one year later, gave her an enviable reputation as a writer for children, for they are as much read today as when first produced. Short comedies for American players, a translation and adaptation of several excellent plays of French authorship, was a departure from her usual field, but a successful one. Under her personal direction, these plays were produced in both Lenox and New York and netted an aggregate of about $20,000 for the different charities in whose behalf they were given. Next followed a number of historical papers upon Colonial America. The Fair Faxes in America, an article read before the New York Historical Society, June 2, 1880, was a truthful and vigorous historical essay of unusual attraction on account of the grace of its artistic workmanship. A sketch of the life of Colonel William Bird of Westover appeared some two years later and was equally well received. In 1889, the Anglo-Maniacs caused a great stir in society. He did not cause any personal stirring, she has said. Her all agreed that the Anglo worshippers were not overdrawn. People criticized, but they never caught themselves in the act of Anglo worshipping. They say their neighbors pay homage to the fetish and said, I believe these foolish people inspired Mrs. Harrison's work. Oh yes, I am quite safe and quite comfortable, I assure you. My feet are planted on that basic rule of human nature. Discover the beam in your neighbor's eyes and don't look for the moat in your own. Had that rule been reversed, I might have had some unhappy luncheon, tea, or reception memories. But after a quarter of a century of writing about society people and seeing that they will not discover themselves, I feel secure and impregnable in my fortress of criticism. My characters were taken from life, yes indeed, but they are copied of types rather than individuals. That may be one of the reasons that I have not been persecuted by an angry original. Types after all are composites. Flower Dehundred, her next work, was set in southern surroundings and was successful, although not to such an extent as the one preceding. A daughter of the South, which next appeared, was a collection of her short stories, some of which had been published in magazine form. Sweet Bell's Out of Tune was followed by A Bachelor Made, which was condensed for Russian readers in a leading Russian magazine. An errant wooing was an interesting love story, and in this her knowledge of foreign life was well utilized. The Mary Made of Arcady was followed by Crows Nest, which has brought the author more letters from all parts of the country than any of her books. One was from a Western ranchman and said, Your book has gone the rounds, but it has always come back, and I have threatened to put a bullet in the hide of the man who does not return it. With this letter the author was greatly pleased. The circle of a century and a princess of the hills are two of her later books, which have received very favorable comment. Although the latter is a complete departure from her ordinary scenes of action, and is a story of Italian life and of a foreign environment which she has good reason to know with accuracy, such a long list of publications bears full witness to the energy which has characterized her life. I was made for action, she has said. I cannot relax as so many do. I haven't the temperament, and besides, there is so much to do. I would be unable to write, did I not thoroughly believe in my characters. I am always living and observing a dozen lives. There is much satisfaction in doing work correctly. I am in love with mine and am a hard worker. I would like to write something that everyone would read, something powerful. Perhaps she may, such persistence and patience toil are worthy of accomplishing the desired end. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 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 Betty B. Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books by Edward Francis Harkins. Charles Egbert Craddock, Miss Murphy. On March 4, 1885, the Boston Evening Transcript printed the following paragraph. Last evening, Dr. Holmes and Mr. Howells received a genuine surprise at the hands of the editor of the Atlantic. Mr. Aldrich invited these gentlemen to dine with him to meet Charles Egbert Craddock, the author of In the Tennessee Mountains, Where the Battle was Fought, and the remarkable novel now publishing in the Atlantic the Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains. The surprise lay in the fact that Charles Egbert Craddock is a pseudonym, which for the past six years has veiled the identity of a very brilliant woman, Miss Mary Ann Murphy of St. Louis. Thus the curtain was run down on one of the neatest comedies ever presented to the American reading public and what a distinguished cast the comedy had. It was in May, 1878, during the administration of Mr. Howells that the readers of the Atlantic were treated to a most delightful, a most refreshing surprise, a story of the Tennessee Mountains called The Dancing Party at Harrison's Cove by a new author, Charles Egbert Craddock. The quaint and unprecedented strain was noticeable in the first colloquial sentence. For you see, Miss Darley, them Harrison folks over yander to the Cove have terminated on a dancing party. Mr. Howells was pleased with his discovery. The Atlantic readers, then the most critical literary company in America, hailed the coming of a promising author. The professional critics hesitated at first and then echoed the popular applause. Time passed and Mr. Aldrich took Mr. Howells chair in the Atlantic office and one of the first official acts of the new editor was to write to Charles Egbert Craddock inviting more contributions. Then, pending an answer, he ordered in two Craddock stories that had been left over by reason of a superabundance of somewhat more important material. The response to his invitation came in the shape of a series of as excellent American stories as ever was published. The Star in the Valley, The Romance of Sunrise Rock, Over on the Tother Mountain, The Heart That Walks, Chilhoee, Electioneering on Big Engine Mounting, A Plan on Old Sledge at Settlement, and the exceptionally long and powerful Drifting Down Lost Creek, which ran through three numbers of the Atlantic. Later, there appeared a novel where the battle was fought, a work hardly worthy of its predecessors. In time, the name of Charles Egbert Craddock was signed to three books. The novel just mentioned a collection of short stories in the Tennessee mountains and to Down the Reveen, a tale for the young folks in whom the author then took a lively interest. All in all, they were profoundly interesting stories, revealing a deep insight into the manners of the pent-up, ignorant, law-flaunting, hard-headed, and pure-hearted mountaineers. Palacio Valdez calls attention to that beautiful spectacle, a virginal man of 80. John Fox Jr., who has been walking in the footsteps of the author of In the Tennessee Mountains, once said to us that he had met southern mountaineers who at 30 were as chaste as angels. But aside from the virility of the Craddock sketches, there were more substantial marks of the author's masculine sex. There was legal acumen, for instance, which led to the assumption that Craddock was a lawyer who turned to literature for recreation. And there was the bold, manly handwriting, inky handwriting, a bottle of ink to a page. So inky indeed that when Mr. Aldrich thought of asking the southerner for a cereal, the prophet of the great Smoky Mountains, he remarked, I wonder if Craddock has laid in his winter's ink yet. Perhaps I can get a cereal out of him. It was already known on Park Street, where the old-fashioned headquarters of the Atlantic Monthly are to be seen today that Charles Egbert Craddock was the pseudonym of M.N. Murphree. Ah, so his name is Murphree, they were exclaiming. Monday, March 2nd, 1885, brought three guests from St. Louis to Hotel Vendome in Boston. And there they were registered as W.L. Murphree Sr. and the Mrs. Murphree. But the literary world was still in a state of blissful ignorance. Last Monday morning, we quote from a contemporaneous account of the incident as Mr. Aldrich was in the editorial room of the Atlantic Monthly, word was brought to him that a lady below wished to see him. He went down and met a pleasant young lady who remarked that she was Charles Egbert Craddock. Mr. Aldrich could hardly have been more astounded had the roof fallen in. And he turned and ran several steps under the pressure of the shock before he recovered his usually imperturbable presence of mind. He would have been better prepared to find under that name a strapping six foot Tennessean than the delicate looking lady before him. He now says he's inclined to doubt the sex of all the other Atlantic's contributors whom he has not met. There are certain things in George Elliot's writings which now that one knows one can clearly see could have been written only by a woman. But in the writings of Charles Egbert Craddock, there's not the slightest trace of feminine influence. Dr. Holmes and Mr. House were equally astonished at meeting Mr. Craddock in Ms. Murfrey. Mr. House had written that he could not come owing to another engagement though he wished very much to meet Craddock but he was persuaded to come by Mr. Aldrich. On his way he called it a prominent publishers who said tell Craddock to drop around and see us. It will hardly be a violation of privacy to say that the evening was a delightful one to all that the chief guest was addressed as they by the host in recognition of the quality of Ms. Murfrey and Charles Egbert Craddock while the hostess could not lose the latter name from mine and compromised with Ms. Craddock. It is reasonable to inquire why the innocent deception was practiced for so long a time. The author's brother William L. Murfrey Jr. once partly illuminated the matter. He said, Mr. Aldrich and her publishers knew that Craddock was an assumed name but never doubted that M. N. Murfrey was a man. The gnome de plume, her style of writing and chirrography all contributed to this impression. The name was assumed as well for a cloak in case of failure as to secure the advantage that a man has in literature over a woman. He obtains a quicker reading by the publishers is better received by the public in the beginning and altogether has an easier time of it. Accident led to the choice of the name which had been much discussed in the family before being finally determined upon by her in the form used. Those portions of her writings which are called peculiarly masculine are not in any sense affectations. It was never doubted she was a man and hence there was no reason for the adoption of disguise in writing. Each portion of her work was read to the family before being sent away and it may be sometimes criticized as to some detail. She is too positive and painstaking to need or allow much interference in the plan or arrangement of her material. Inexperience is the only excuse for the idea that prejudice against women exists among either the publishers or the people who read and love books. The proofs in opposition to this idea especially in these days are too numerous to present. The pseudonym came to be chosen in this way. Ed Burke Craddock was the name of the hero of Miss Murphy's second story which was only partly written when the time came to send the manuscript of the first story to the publishers. In doubt regarding what pen name to adopt Miss Murphy took the name of her new hero and prefixed Charles to it just to give it the appearance of very similar to. All in all it was a very happy choice and inspired choice. Mary Noelle Murphy was born at Grantlands near Murphy'sboro, Tennessee in 1850. Grantlands was the family home inherited from her great grandfather Colonel Hardy Murphy, a gallant soldier of the revolution who in 1807 moved from his native state of North Carolina to the new state of Tennessee where he settled near the town that later was given his name. Miss Murphy's father William Law Murphy was a lawyer by profession her mother was Priscilla, the daughter of Judge Dickinson. The names of both her father and her brother have a place in American literature. Mary exhibited literary aspirations even when as a little girl she went to school in Nashville. Later she and her sister Fanny went to school in Philadelphia. The Murphy's were hard hit by the War of the Rebellion and their distress was emphasized by Mary's poor health but the young woman showed a dauntless spirit quietly observant, keenly imaginative and strongly inclined to write. She began to set down her impressions of the life about her. Notably the life in the Tennessee mountains where the family usually spent the summer with what successful admirable results the lovers of American literature know full well. In 1881 the family moved to St. Louis but Miss Murphy's present address is her native town in Tennessee. She could not fairly be characterized as a dialect writer. Her narration is generally excellent and her power of description is especially praiseworthy. Note, for example, the life and the grace in the first lines of the heart that walks chillowy. The breeze freshened after the sun went down and the hop and gourd vines were all a stir as they clung about the little porch where Clarsey was sitting now idle at last. The rain clouds had disappeared and there bent over the dark, heavily wooded ridges, a pale blue sky, with here and there the crystalline sparkle of a star. A halo was shimmering in the east where the mists had gathered about the great white moon hanging high above the mountains. Noiseless wings flitted through the dusk. Now and then the bats swept by so close as to move Clarsey's hair with the wind of their flight. What an airy glittering magical thing was that gigantic spider web suspended between the silver moon and her shining eyes. Ever in the non there came from the woods a strange, weird, long-drawn sigh unlike the stir of the wind in the trees, unlike the fret of the water on the rocks. Was it the voiceless sorrow of the sad earth? There were stars in the night besides those known to astronomers. The stellar fireflies gemmed the black shadows with a fluctuating brilliancy. They circled in and out of the porch and touched the leaves above Clarsey's head with quivering points of light. A steadier and an intenser gleam was advancing along the road and the sound of languid footsteps came with it. The aroma of tobacco graced the atmosphere and a tall figure walked up to the gate. Note above the engaging swing of the words the masculine touch, the aroma of tobacco graced the atmosphere. Surely, Mr. Aldrich and his associates, not to mention the readers of the Atlantic, were justified in thinking of Mr. Craddock. And in the same story, you will find another remarkably vivid picture, not large and overwhelming. That is not the author's style, but small and delicate with all the scenery of a photograph, but even a more impressive appearance of reality. The picture of Clarsey sitting at the window in the moonlight. Ms. Murphy's brother is our authority to the statement that her pictures of people are of types, not individuals, and where it is thought an individual has been drawn, it is because that person possesses, in a large degree, the peculiarities of his class. The vital fact, however, is the author's success in portraiture. Her skill in infusing vitality into her picturesque characters. Her artistic employment of a cultivated imaginative temperament. Her natural gifts quite suit her choice of subjects. It might be said superficially, but beneath the surface of her success is to be seen the artistry that adorns all subjects. She is an artist, as we would say of Ms. Jewett or Ms. Wilkins. Like them, she would successfully hold the mirror up to her nature, anywhere. Personally, she's a medium height and slight form. Her features are prominent in a square and projecting forehead. Large gray eyes, a deep set Grecian nose, a large mouth, and a chin that may be described as accounting for her positiveness. On the whole, a pleasant, magnetic, impressive face. She converses vivaciously and her friends say she is a captivating storyteller. Her work is a valuable, as well as entertaining contribution to American literature. Indeed, she has covered her field so well that any hope of improving upon her standard or even of emulating it as laudably is almost futile. End of chapter five. Chapter six 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 Elizabeth Holland. Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books by Edward Francis Harkins. Chapter six. Anna Catherine Green. Mrs. Rolfs. It is related that when the Leavenworth case was published in 1878, the Pennsylvania legislature turned from politics to discuss the identity of its author. There was the name on the title page, Anna Catherine Green, as distinct as the city of Harrisburg itself. But it must be a nom de plume, some protested. A man wrote the story. Maybe a man already famous and signed a woman's name to it. The story was manifestly beyond a woman's powers. Feminine names were considerably scarcer in the American fiction list than they are today. When girls fresh from the high school take a place among the authors of the best-selling books. A New York lawyer happened to be present at the politician's discussion. You are mistaken, he said to the incredulous. I have seen the author of the Leavenworth case and conversed with her. And her name is really Miss Green. Then she must have got some man to help her retorted the more obstinate theorists. They strongly remind us of the characters whom Miss Green, as we shall call her for the moment, portrays so skillfully. The self-willed characters had aimed so well, but do not hit even the target, not to mention the bullseye. The incredulity exemplified by the Pennsylvanians was natural enough that an American woman in those days should venture into the field of romantic literature was so uncommon as to be noteworthy, but that an American woman should write detective stories. Well, that was quite preposterous. And yet nowadays it would seem no more preposterous than a request to Mr. Carnegie to build a library. For the love of a good detective story, of a story interwoven with adventure and mystery is in most persons a simple manifestation of the instinctive love of excitement. We know a professor, one of the most brilliant men in his profession, who has never lost his juvenile fondness for the pursuit of fire engines. Similarly, many men and women are never cured of their youthful passion for the literature of the disguises and the handcuffs. Hawkshaw, how the name thrills even today. It takes many a man back to the days when the tattered dime novel was smuggled into the schoolroom. Sometimes the almost breathless attention to syntax or the map of the New England states betrayed the guilt. But we firmly believe that there were teachers who never confiscated those prizes. But measuring by the incessant changes in times and in manners, it is not difficult to understand that a quarter of a century ago, the still conservative reading public was lost to believe that the author of the Leavenworth case was a woman. Anna Catherine Green, the woman in question was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 11, 1846. She was 32 therefore it will be seen when the story that made her famous was published. Her father was a well-known lawyer. Indeed the Greens we have been told were a family of lawyers. This may account for the skill with which the daughter has tied and cut cordy and knots. It unquestionably accounts for her nimble imagination, her skill in producing subtle hypothesis and her strength in handling the most intricate psychological problems. In 1867, Anna was graduated from the Ripley Female College in Pultme, Vermont. And she may, if she please, write BA after her name. She composed verses and stories at the age of 11. And speaking of verses, how many readers are acquainted with the fact that the author of the Leavenworth case is also the author of a drama in blank verse and of a volume of ballads and narrative poems. Yet the defense of the bride and other poems has won in cameos from discreet critics. And in some respects, Recife's daughter, a drama is her most ambitious work. Perhaps therefore, as we are to consider her poetry as an incidental, it may not be a miss at this point to quote a few characteristic verses. The two stanzas which follow are taken from a poem entitled At the Piano. Play on, play on, as softly glides. The low refrain, I seam, I seam, To float to float on golden tides. By sunlit aisles where life and dream Are one or one, and hope and bliss Move hand in hand in thrilling kiss Neath bowery blooms in twilight glooms, And love is life, and life is love. Play on, play on, as higher rise. The lifted strains, I seam, I seam, To mount to mount through rosy at skies, Through drifted cloud and golden gleam, To realms, to realms of thought and fire, Where angels walk and souls aspire, And sorrow comes but as the night That brings a star for our delight. Some of the criticisms of the book, The defense of the bride and other poems Were extremely and indeed rather absurdly flattering. A moderately toned opinion was given in Harper's Monthly. The ballads and narrative poems, Which form the greater part of this collection, Are vigorous productions whose barrenness Of redundant words and epithets, And whose directness and straightforwardness Of narration are in strong contrast With the diffused garrulity of most female writers. She has the true storyteller's faculty For investing what she has to say with interest And for keeping expectation on the stretch. And she delivers her message with masculine force and brevity. One of the critics, by the way, compared Miss Green. She was still Miss Green then in 1882. With Alfred Austin, Miss Green says the critic Seems to be able to say delicate and graceful things As easily as does the English poet. That was before Mr. Austin became poet laureate Before comparisons with him were particularly odious. Pacifici's daughter, we may say, in a word, is notable Rather than for its well-sustained dramatic strength Than for any a special skill or grace of versification. It seems to have convinced its author that her lines Might be cast in happier places. But to return to the main road, we have already seen That as a girl, Anna had literary aspirations. But they reached no serious stage of development Until after her return from Ripley College. She felt drawn to literature, and yet she was in no hurry Either to decide which of the diverse literary fields Was best suited to her taste and talent, or to see her name in print. At this critical time, her father was friend and counselor. He perceived that there was no fickleness back of his daughter's ambition To adopt literature as a profession. And what is more important, he perceived that she Might successfully qualify as a candidate. So he set about to direct and to encourage her zeal. He found Anna a docile pupil. When doubts arose, when discouragement appeared, He was nearby to cheer her and to advise. He enlisted her sympathy in different cases that interested him. He sharpened her wits. He disgorced to her on his own interesting experiences. He contributed judicious criticisms. Above all, he fostered her confidence in her own powers. In this way she acquired from her father gifts that she had not inherited from him. Hers was a remarkably well equipped intellect before one of her books had been published. The Leavenworth case came to startle the reading public in 1878. The plot of the story had been in the author's mind for some years. The book, therefore, was no inspired or spasmodic effort. Rather it was the product of a finely regulated intellect applied to the ever entertaining theories of cause and effect. What if those legislators had been informed of the fact that the author was a student of criminology? Mrs. Roff's is too adept at psychologists to pretend that instinct led her with the manuscript of the Leavenworth case to Mr. G. P. Pupman's office. It was more likely a simple piece of good fortune to happen upon so wise and liberal and appraiser. It is a tribute to his perspicacity that he introduced to the American reading public one of its most popular writers. And it is a happy commentary on the relationship between author and publisher that, with an exception or two, the Pupman House has issued the periodical output of Anna Catherine Green. When a strange disappearance appeared in 1885, a critic, or perhaps we should say reviewer, made the comment, we have a Gaborio in our own tongue. It must have seemed extremely flattering, assuming that the author of a strange disappearance is normally susceptible to flattery, to be named favorably in the same sentence with the brilliant Frenchman. Mrs. Roff's resembles Gaborio insofar as her strong point, as his was, is the simple and perspicuous narrative of events. Thus too she resembles Wilkie Collins, who was called an imitator of Gaborio. But we doubt that any pen, excepting Gaborios, could write or could have written the first part of Monsieur Lecoq. Possibly the English writer thought he saw an imitator in the author of the Leavenworth case. At any rate, while she was enjoying the first fruits of renown, Collins wrote to her publishers that he sincerely admired her stories, and we understand that he conveyed to the young American some wise practical hints and warm expressions of belief in her future. The belief has been abundantly justified. It is said, we quote from an anonymous paper dealing with the career of the New York author, that she does not herself claim to be a novelist. She is not a novelist in the sense that George Eliot and Hawthorne are novelists. These words remind us of the reflections of Mr. Herbert Paul, the brilliant English essayist on Collins's Woman in White and Moonstone. Are these books and others like them literature, he asks? Maybe Collins deliberately stripped his style of all embellishment. Even epithets are excluded as they are from John Austen's Letters on Juris Brutus. It is strange that a man of letters should try to make his books resemble police reports. But if he does, he must take the consequences. He cannot serve God and Mammon. The reflections, to some extent, may be applied direct to Mrs. Roth's books, for they too are stripped almost bare of epithets. But if, as Mr. Crawford, for example, urges, if the first purpose of a novel is entertainment, then the books bearing the name of Anna Catherine Green are excellent novels. But it is not a point to be insisted upon. Let the statement suffice that the books in question, whatever be their true denomination, give rare pleasure. The steadiest critics, like Professor Bates of Wellesley, may classify them as police court literature. But even in the police court is revealed the joy and the woe of human passions, the wonderful keenness and the terrible dullness of the human intellect. Mrs. Roth snows her limitations and is content to be exalted or condemned by her performances. Her manner of working takes us back to Charles Reid, the account of any remarkable or strange event that comes to her attention in the reading of the newspapers. She cuts out and pastes into a scrapbook. When the time comes to write out the plots, which she has previously developed in her mind, she takes care to work only when she can work at her best. Sometimes she writes, therefore, two hours a day, sometimes ten. But there is none of that plan of persistent plotting, day in and day out, to produce a prescribed amount which Antony Trollup carried on so successfully. Yet in the twenty-three years covering her literary career, she has written a score of books. This has been no light task for one with a household to take care of, for in November 1884 the novelist became Mrs. Charles Roth's. Some of the books have been translated into German and Swedish, which circumstance is a notable tribute to their attractiveness. Technically Professor Bates was justified in referring to Mrs. Roth's as the foremost representative in America today of police court literature. Yet to us this reference seems unsatisfactory. Unadequate, it conveys no hint of the constructive skill, the imaginative power, and the perceptive faculties necessary for the praiseworthy writing of police court literature, and, furthermore, it offers no suggestion of Anna Catherine Greene's exquisite sense of humor. How delightfully, for example, that most interesting Spencer in that affair next door. Miss Butterworth, as we remember the name, plays hostess for the Van Burnham Girls. What a genuine piece of comedy amid the pathos and terror round about, and how much flesh and blood there is in many of these unpretentious tales of mystery. One may not approve that sort of literature, or take any pleasure in it, but it is not to be denied that Mrs. Roth's writes artistically. Art concerns the work, not the subject. We venture the prediction that the stories written by Anna Catherine Greene, by virtue not only of their attractive schoolfulness, but also of their perennially interesting subjects, will be read eagerly and with delight with many of the novels of the brighter present fame have accumulated dust. End of Chapter 6. Chapter 7 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 Betty B. Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books by Edward Francis Harkins. Chapter 7. Molly Elliott Seawill. When Rudyard Kipling issued a story with strange characters before it, people wondered. They wondered still more when they discovered that in 007, the reputorial hand of the master exhibited a knowledge of steam engines that was as technically correct as that of the man who designed them. When Seaman read the sea tales of Molly Elliott Seawill, they were in the same mental condition as the engineer who read the article with the hieroglyphic heading. They marveled. It was not the technical knowledge of vessels and the navy alone that made Miss Seawill's stories so fascinating. With that, they combined a delicate and romantic touch that was unusual. For with the everyday story of the sea, there's often a certain roughness that destroys the pleasure of a sensitive reader. For this reason, one prominent American author has few admirers among the gentler sex. An uncle of Molly Elliott Seawill had been in the United States Navy before the Civil War. After the commencement of hostilities, he had resigned to follow the Confederate arms and has served with distinction throughout the four years of open hostilities. From him, she heard in childhood true and glowing accounts of what is known as the romantic period of the American Navy, the period when ships still carried a great spread of canvas, when cruises met long absences of years from home and a naval officer was called upon to meet tremendous emergencies now provided for by the cable and the telegraph. This is what stimulated her to write of Decatur and Summers of Paul Jones of midshipman pauling of quarter-deck and foxical and a little Jarvis and the technical knowledge she displayed like everything she has done was the result of hard and conscientious mental labor. In 1890, the youth companion, which periodically gives some stimulus to good writing held out a prize of $500 for the best written story for boys.  It was the story of our Navy and of midshipman, which is the same patriotic wholesomeness that is possessed by Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country and as it has nearly as large a circulation today as when first published in book form, there is no doubt that it will have as long and prosperous a career. Miss Seawill's literary life is a curious example of the results of environment born in a quaint and long-established Virginia community, Gloucester County, she was brought up in a distinct atmosphere of books and of good literature. Her father was a lawyer of note and in the great rambling house, the shelter was a fine old-fashioned library. It included a collection of the English classics and many translations of 18th century books of French philosophy, which Thomas Jefferson, when minister to France had selected for her great grandfather, Judge Tyler, one of the first federal judges appointed under the present system and for three terms, governor of his state. He was a great reader and his love of books was transmitted to his descendants. As a child, she went to school most irregularly and at a short term at a fashionable boarding school where she declared she learned nothing but folly in irreverence. At home, the morning hours which other children spent with arithmetic, geography, or science, she passed in making the intimate acquaintance of the library books. Here she met with Shakespeare, an ancient edition of his works with all of Johnson's, Stevens, and Malone's notes, which had been read by several generations of Seawells and showed it and here also with Volney, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other philosophers whom she approached when in her teens and could not well understand. Her father and mother forbade her to read novels for fear of her getting notions in her head, but while they were strongly denying her such wild delights as Rhoda Broughton and Wita might furnish, she was imbibing Byron and Shelley with the highest relish. By the time she was 15, she knew all they could teach about the emotions and when novels were allowed, her found them decidedly tamed beside her already acquired knowledge of what they were all about. Her mother was devoted to reading from the beginning to the end of her life and absorbed Shakespeare with the thoroughness that Esselda met with. Every two or three years she would begin deliberately at the first pages of The Tempest and read through to the last page of Titus Andronicus and in the same way would read Hume's History of England, Scott's novels and many other standard works. She was also a systematic peruser of newspapers and had better knowledge of public affairs than most people in public life. It thus can easily be seen how honestly the daughter came by her love of writing. She was unconsciously but naturally fitted for it as is the fisherman with many generations of seamen behind him and a home in Gloucester. Miss Seawell is herself an omnivorous reader. Thackery, Macaulay and Jane Austen have been her roast beef and potatoes of artistic creation, although she is passionately fond of biographies. So fond indeed of Boswells Johnson that one literary acquaintance declares it to be the only book she had really read because no matter what is the subject of conversation, she's certain to bring in a remark about the celebrated author. Her home is with her sister in a charming house near Dupont Circle or a millionaire circle in Washington and overlooking the gardens of the Spanish legation. It is here that she does her literary work and in very systematic fashion where she is of the opinion that the mind can be made to work automatically as well as the body and we can command our powers more than we can believe. Every morning at half past nine, she retires to her own room and while there writes steadily until the lunch and hour. Books and ideas of books are now discarded until the following day. This work is discontinued from the middle of June until the first of October when she retires from home as far away as she can get and therein vibes fresh ideas for forthcoming romances while taking a complete rest from literary endeavor. In spite of this habit of yearly travel abroad, she is a thoroughly patriotic American and is frequently remarked that nothing would induce her to leave her native country without a ticket for the return voyage. Upon every subject upon which she writes, she reads as much as possible following the example of Thackeray who said that the Virginians was the resultant of a thousand books and in her long journeys of investigation to places far from home, she but imitates the method of the great Macaulay who would sometimes travel a hundred miles to write a single line of description. The scenes of the House of Igromonde which has recently appeared were laid in France and in order to obtain the proper material, a special visit was necessary to the country in which the events were laid. The Quaint Palace of Saint-Germain with its terraces and broad gardens was well studied by the author who spent days in rambling about and in absorbing a thorough knowledge of the neighborhood. Like other authors, she has found that to saturate the mind with a certain period is a powerful assistance to the imagination and for this reason she oftentimes has read three or four entire volumes in order to write a story of 5,000 words. In 1895, the New York Herald offered four prizes, one of $10,000 for the best novel, one of $3,000 for the best novelette, one of $2,000 for the best short story, and one of $1,000 for the best epic poem on a subject of American history. First and third prizes were respectively won by Mr. Julian Hawthorne and Mr. Edgar Fawcett while Miss Sewell received the money for the best novelette, the sprightly romance of Marsec and over the heads of 2,000 competitors. When the news that she had received a $3,000 prize reached the old family Negroes in Gloucester County, the Darkies magnified the amount 10 hundred fold and went about with natural awe and astonishment while solemnly proclaiming, Mars, John Sewell's daughter, done taken $3 million for one book. The story she considers one of her best productions and it is her best known work with the exception of Little Jarvis, but she has a long list of novels and juveniles to her credit and one play, the manuscript of which she was the author, made Marian, an amusing and witty satire on the Nicarabacca element in New York society was originally written as a short novel and was subsequently dramatized by Miss Sewell for Rosina Vokes who made it a great success. Lippincott's magazine had the honor of receiving her first literary venture and it was her first literary success for it was accepted. The editor who appreciated its merit has however, never had the satisfaction of knowing his own keenness and literary foresight for it was signed under an assumed name. In fact, under a variety of pseudonyms, a great number of her earlier stories, sketches and articles of all sorts were published in magazines and newspapers. Where these immature productions are to be found, she is never revealed and says she never will and for this reason reckons herself more fortunate than most writers for the criticism which might justly be severe upon this prentice work as had no chance to be expended. Curiously enough, to literature may be ascribed the influence that changed her earlier religious faith when a small girl, an aunt who had the reputation of being the best read woman in the state of Virginia, warned her that her grandmother who had died many years before her birth had been in youth much unsettled in her religious beliefs by reading the very books to which her descendant was becoming so firmly attached and with which she was spending so much time in the well fitted library of the shelter. The grandmother in question was undoubtedly a woman of uncommon capacity and of restless inquiry and probably a very pronounced agnostic at one time in her life. But sorrow and age and physical suffering brought about a change. Miss Sewell's extremely pious aunt always declared that wider experience and a deeper knowledge of life and of books had changed her mother into a devout Christian in middle life. Unlike the experience of her grandmother, the result of this reading was to turn Miss Sewell's thoughts toward religious inquiry instead of in the opposite direction. Indeed a daring thing for a young girl in a community like that of Gloucester County where the Episcopal Church had been established for nearly 300 years and where there was a strong survival of the old English idea of church and state. In her own circle of friends and relatives, the young girls were confirmed usually at 16 or 17 and their brothers, although not frequently particularly pious were expected to be graduated into vestrimen and strict churchmen as their ancestors had been before them. In the midst of her reading of Mr. Jefferson's selections of French philosophers, she came suddenly across Macaulay's essays. In his review of ranks, history of the popes and in speaking of the Catholic church occurs this passage. She may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall in the midst of a vast solitude take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. This impressed her immensely and for the first time she realized the existence of that tremendous community which prefers the moral case of the great Roman church. The severe blows which Macaulay frequently levels at the established Church of England in his essay on Hallam's constitutional history as well as the admiration which Thackeray expressed in nearly all his stories for the Catholic religion made a deep impression upon the sensitive mind of such a young girl. Macaulay or Thackeray never dreamed of making a convert to the church of which neither was a member but such indeed was the case. A list of some of her more important novels includes the Berkley's and their neighbors, Throckmorton, Children of Destiny, Jade Marion, The History of Lady Betty Stair and the Loves of Arabella. For several years she has been running away from the reputation she made in her juveniles because it interferes with her reputation for more serious work. It is for this reason that we have had no further stories of little Jarvis and his fellow midshipmen. A magazine article which Miss Sewell once wrote and which was called The Absence of the Creative Faculty in Woman had considerable ephemeral theme. It was praised, attacked and criticized by writers all over the United States and in many European countries. Certain masculine critics as Mr. Andrew Lang who wisely declined to take sides with Miss Sewell declared that her essay had disproved her own case. Papa Bouchard which the Messers Scribner Miss Sewell's publishers claim will duplicate the success of the sprightly romance of Marsak will be published October the 1st, 1901. Besides this she has a long novel in preparation to be finished early in 1902 and which will probably appear under the name of Francesca Capello. End of chapter seven. Chapter eight 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 Elizabeth Holland. Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books by Edward Francis Harkins. Chapter eight, Amelia E. Barr. For the last 16 years the name of Amelia E. Barr has been one of the foremost in the list of popular American writers. Strictly speaking, Mrs. Barr is as much English as American for she was born in Overston Lancashire, England in 1831. And since the establishment of her fame her books have been almost as widely read in the old country as in this. But notwithstanding the ties of birth and popular affection and notwithstanding the fact that many of her stories have dealt with British countries and British character she is as she probably would say herself more American than foreign. For nearly 50 years she has been a resident of the United States. Here her children were born. Here her noble husband died. Here she has struggled and here succeeded. A more interesting career we have not had the pleasure of sketching. Amelia Edith Huddleston was her name in girlhood. Her father was the Reverend William Henry Huddleston. She is fond of applying to her own case they say the old Scotch proverb it is good luck to be born in a house full of good company with a full moon and a high tide. When she was a girl she served her father as reader and thus she was introduced into the literary as well as into the social world. Our feminine readers will probably enjoy learning how strong an influence dolls had on Mrs. Barr's early life. The dolls most in use when I was a child in Yorkshire and Lancashire she says were wooden ones. A round head, square body, legs and arms of thin slats of wood fastened to the body with wire thus making the limbs flexible and moveable. I possessed a number of all sizes and I don't think I use them in the ordinary way. I valued them as entities for representing my story books with big dolls for giants, little ones for children and fairies and medium ones for men and women. She was an imaginative child that will be noticed. When I was six years old there was a great agitation on the slavery question and a black leather doll was given to me to represent a Negro. For some time I failed to place him. Then I read Robinson Crusoe and he became of course Man Friday. Then a little later a slave. My first copy book I remember was covered in pale yellow paper bearing a picture of a very black slave loaded with chains, toiling in the sugar field and a tall white overseer with a whip standing near.  Loaded my Negro doll with chains, selected a white doll to act as overseer and finally I allowed the doll I called Apolian in Pilgrim's Progress to run away with the overseer. Cinderella was one of my favorite playmates. She was a lovely blonde as was her fairy godmother and the only doll I possessed that might be called a baby was a large wax affair that could open and shut its eyes and who came to me on my fourth birthday in a long narrow box lined with blue satin. When I was eight years old, my story books were too complex for such illustrations as the dolls once provided and I have a dim memory of a wet Saturday and stories from ancient history and a miniature funeral pyre with the nursery fender on which all the heroes of my first romances received the fiery solution. I think of them all tenderly now. There was a pathos about those graceless wooden toys, some of which I can recall with a vividness almost startling. They still live though they never had life and this is a mystery which in my next idle hour I must ponder. Idle hours come seldom to Mrs. Barr in spite of her fulfilled three score years and 10. She is not of the idle race and she is distinguished no less for her enthusiastic industry than for her tenderness of heart and her fertility of imagination. Mr. Hamilton W. Maybe tells us that as a child she was her father's boon companion in his preaching tours through the fishing villages and that rocks and boats in the surge of the sea were the background and accompaniment of many happy days. In 1850, shortly after her education had been completed at Glasgow, she married Robert Barr, a Scotchman and four years afterwards she came to this country with him. They lived for a while in New York, then in the West, then in the South and finally they settled in Austin, Texas where Mr. Barr established himself as a merchant. At the close of the Civil War the family which then included three sons and three daughters moved to Galveston. There took place the tragedy which changed the course of Mrs. Barr's life. We repeat the circumstances as they were related a few years ago. The yellow fever broke out with extraordinary violence in Texas in 1867. The terror of the visitation is still remembered. People died on every side. The Indians especially fell like flies before the poisoned breath of the pestilence. The panic spread and all the white folk who could abandoned the afflicted district. Mr. Barr refused to leave for the Indians trusted him and took from his hand medicines which they refused to take from another. The doctors and nurses all died or left. Still Mr. Barr stood his ground and his wife remained by his side. His gallant efforts are honorably mentioned in the official reports of that terrible visitation. Mr. Barr literally laid down his life to save others' lives. Before the pestilence abated Mrs. Barr had lost three sons and her husband. The three daughters still remained to her and for them she resolved to live and work. Or as Mr. Mabee says, in the desperate struggle against despair which followed Mrs. Barr turned her face northward and settled in New York in the autumn of 1869. She was then 38. She was fortunate in bringing with her to New York a letter of introduction to Robert Bonner, the generous and influential editor of the New York Ledger. Her first original literary undertaking was a short story published in the Christian Union. While writing she was learning to write. Circumstances had thrown her virtually upon her own resources. Her naturally buoyant disposition stood by her well. It sweetened her work. It brightened the future. Here is an account of those days that we once ran across. She wrote advertisements, circulars, paragraphs, verses, et cetera. She spent hours daily in the Aster Library studying the secrets of her craft, getting up materials for descriptive articles and historical stories. For a long time she considered herself rich if a $10 note stood between her and the future. The precious notes were deposited between the leaves of a Bible with tarnished clasps which still lies on Mrs. Barr's table. One of the incidents that she and her daughter who was her devoted companion often recall is of a night when thieves broke in and stole all they could lay their hands on. Breaking opened the desk and taking the trinkets that had been deposited there for safety. But the Bible that lay near it and that held all the family's fortune was left untouched. The stress of that time of struggle and probation was lightened when Mrs. Barr's first serial story appeared in the columns of the ledger. Her first great success, the success that found her renowned came in 1885 with the publication of Jan Vetter's wife. Although we find records of the publication of at least three other books, Scottish Sketches and Clonnie MacPherson, 1883 and Paul and Christina, 1882. But there was power as well as originality in Jan Vetter's wife. And to this day it remains one of the novelist most noteworthy and most characteristic tales. It has passed through many editions and it has been read in many countries and many languages. It was on Thanksgiving Day, 1884 by the way that Mrs. Barr received notice of its acceptance. The scene of Jan Vetter's disappearance and apparent resurrection has especially been given wide quotation because of its rare dramatic force. Its singular commingling of the earthly and the spiritual element, a commingling that has had much to do with the establishment of the author's remarkable popularity. For in addition to an intimate knowledge of the world's simpler folk, Mrs. Barr displays the deepest reverence for religion, which fact tends sometimes to make her books unique. A bit of episode characteristic of the author comes to mind. It is the scene in the bow of Orange Ribbon, that delightful picture of New York in provincial days when Joris Van Heemskirk decides to cast his law with the Patriots. He has ended the discussion with his wife, Lisbeth. Then he rose, put on his hat and walked down his garden. And as he slowly paced between the beds of budding flowers, he thought of many things, the traditions of the past struggles for freedom and the irritating wrongs that had embittered his own experience for 10 years. There was plenty of life yet in the spirit his fathers had bequeathed to him. And as this and that memory of wrongs moated, the soul fire kindled, glowed, burned with passionate flame. Free, God gave us this fair land and we will keep it free. There has been in it no crowns and sceptres, no bloody Phillips, no priestly courts of cruelty and in God's name we will have none. He was standing on the riverbank and the meadows over it were green and fair to see and the fresh wind blew into his soul, a thought of his own untrammeled liberty. He looked up and down the river and lifted his face to the clear sky and said aloud, beautiful land, to be thy children we should not deserve. If one inch of thy soil we yielded to a tyrant, truly of water land to me and to mine thou has been, truly do I love thee. And then his soul being moved to its highest mark, he answered it tenderly in the strong, syllable mother tongue that it knew so well. Indian, it, vege, oh, water land, zoo, vege, guida, mayne, reiter, haund, zik, zealth. Since 1885, book after book has come from the pen of Mrs. Barr with amazing regularity. It is a pen that fairly rivals Marian Crawford's end fertility, which is no light statement to make. And yet, notwithstanding this abundance, this luxurience it might be said. The quality is generally excellent, not brilliant indeed or stylish, but rather sweet and endearing. The author of The Maid of Maiden Lane holds the mirror up to nature, but as a rule at the right time, at the good and happy time, so her men, for the most part, are honest and magnanimous. Her women, chaste and charming. Her latest book, The Lion's Welp, a story of Cromwell's time, is one of her strongest. During the middle of the winter, Mrs. Barr, we are told, seeks recreation in New York City or in Virginia, but this spring finds her back in her home on Storm King Mountain, which lies two miles from Hornwall on the Hudson. Cherrycroft, the house is named. It was built, we are told, on plans drawn by the writer herself. Her workshop is on the top floor. A writer in the Boston transcript, July 8, 1901, thus describes Mrs. Barr's method of working. When a book is to be completed from cover to cover, this woman is up and doing, long before the ordinary person is awake, often rising before daylight, a cold plunge taken directly on rising, a light lunch of fruit and coffee, usually partaken of on the veranda, for she is another famous lover of the open air. Spending as much as possible of her time within its invigorating embrace, prepare her for the day's duties, and by the time the sun is beginning to gild the mountains opposite her study window, she is busy with her pen. At 12 comes the important meal of the day, a two-hour snap followed by another cold plunge is then in order, after which the morning's work is carefully typewritten by the author's own hands, no one else being allowed to handle her manuscript, and laborers for the day are over. Then comes relaxation, indoors are out, calling or receiving calls, but the moment the clock strikes nine, no matter what guest or engagements the family may have, she is off to bed. This exacting routine is followed until the book is finished. Not many men or women of 70 live more vigorously or work more enthusiastically and still fewer at that age court success and esteem which still attend Amelia E. Barr. End of chapter eight.