The House on Cherry Street.
The Strawberry Handkerchief.
The Bow of Orange Ribbon.
A Maid of Old New York.
A Song of a Single Note.
The Maid of Maiden Lane.
Trinity Bells.
The Belle of Bowling Green.

So much Mr. Corning. The author of this book can add nothing to so extraordinary a story. As fiction, Mrs. Barr’s own life and performance would be called incredible. Her stories are first-rate stories; all of them offer clean, imaginative and very real entertainment; many of them offer a true and valuable picture of vanished or vanishing times, manners and people. Her achievement was much bigger and more solid and worth while than many, many efforts at literary “art.”

Books by Amelia E. Barr

Jan Vedder’s Wife.
A Border Shepherdess.
Feet of Clay.
Bernicia.
Remember the Alamo.
She Loved a Sailor.
The Lone House.
A Sister of Esau.
Prisoners of Conscience.
The Tioni Whelp.
The Black Shilling.
The Bow of Orange Ribbon.
A Maid of Old New York.
A Song of a Single Note.
The Maid of Maiden Lane.
Trinity Bells.
The Belle of Bowling Green.
The Red Leaves of a Human Heart.
The Strawberry Handkerchief, 1908.
The Hands of Compulsion, 1909.
The House on Cherry Street, 1909.
All the Days of My Life, 1913.
Playing With Fire, 1914.
The Winning of Lucia, 1915.
Three Score and Ten, 1915.
Measures of a Man, 1915.
Profit and Loss, 1916.
Joan, 1917.
Christine, 1917.
An Orkney Maid, 1918.
The Paper Cap, 1918.
Songs in the Common Chord, 1920.
(About 40 other books.)

Mrs. Barr’s novels are published by D. Appleton & Company, New York. Some may be had in reprint, others are out of print.

CHAPTER XXVII
ALICE HEGAN RICE

THE author of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was born in 1870 in a big old country house at Shelbyville, Kentucky, the home of her grandfather, Judge Caldwell. Her name was, indeed, Alice Caldwell Hegan as a girl. It was Alice Hegan when she wrote the very small book which is quite as world famous as Mr. Dooley, Mrs. Wiggs’s pleasant contemporary. It became Alice Hegan Rice on December 18, 1902, when the daughter of Samuel W. Hegan and Sallie P. Hegan was married to the poet Cale Young Rice. And they have lived happily ever after. They have traveled the world over together. They rest, between whiles, at a big, columned house in Louisville, Kentucky. There are photographs extant showing them in pleasant idleness on the broad verandas. Mr. Rice writes songs inspired by their travels together which make such books as Wraiths and Realities and songs inspired by their mere happy proximity, making a book such as Poems to A. H. R., both published in 1918. Mrs. Rice no longer writes the fortunes of Mrs. Wiggs in disused pages of an old business ledger (for that is how the first draft of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was made). But she writes as agreeably as ever. Mostly shorter pieces. She is not really a novelist but a short story writer. Even Mrs. Wiggs was but a long short story.

Hegans have lived in Louisville pretty close to a century—ninety years anyway. Alice Hegan’s girlhood was sheltered by a brick house on Fourth Street. Summers she spent at Judge Caldwell’s house, her birthplace, with a negro nurse and “Aunt Susan” to tell her folk tales, mostly about personable animals, Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the rest of the common acquaintance of Southern childhood. Dolls, church, Sunday School, day school at “Miss Hampton’s” in a house once the home of George Keats, brother of the poet; dancing school (“in ruffles and in gorgeous, wide, blue sashes, pink being prohibited as highly unbecoming”); dances at Galt House; “parties,” country dances in Shelbyville—these were the tissue of those youthful days.

School days over, Alice Hegan wanted to go to Paris and study art. There was reason to think that she had a talent, which would justify an expenditure of time and money. She abandoned the idea because, as she says, “I was an only daughter. My father and mother needed me. It wouldn’t have been right for me to go.”

She had, meanwhile, been writing; she had always been writing a little. When she was sixteen the Louisville Courier-Journal had published The Reveries of a Spinster, an anonymous companion-piece to The Reveries of a Bachelor. The spinster’s reveries brought many letters to the newspaper, letters read with due appreciation by Alice Hegan, author of spinster and reveries both. She had also written a few short stories and had been a contributor to humorous papers.