"I guess God loves you anyway, Nellie," she concluded. "He has sent you a little baby."
The girl tossed the bundle upon the bed with a fierce gesture.
"God?" she said bitterly. "It ain't God sent that baby. The Devil sent him!"
Velleda fled down the stairs.
It is indeed a puzzling world.
[CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK]
Charles Neville Buck, novelist and short-story writer, was born near Midway, Kentucky, April 15, 1879. He spent the first fifteen years of his life at his birthplace, save the four years he was in South America with his father, the Hon. C. W. Buck, who was United States Minister to Peru from 1885 to 1889, and the author of Under the Sun, a Peruvian romance. At the age of fifteen years, Charles Neville Buck went to Louisville to enter the high school; and, in 1898, he was graduated from the University of Louisville. He studied art and joined the staff of The Evening Post, of Louisville, as cartoonist, which position he held for a year, when he became an editorial writer on that paper. Mr. Buck studied law and was admitted to the bar, but he did not practice. In 1908 he quit journalism for prose fiction. His short-stories were accepted by American and English magazines, but he won his first real reputation with a novel of mental aberration, entitled The Key to Yesterday (New York, 1910), the scenes of which were set against Kentucky, France, and South America. Mr. Buck's next novel, The Lighted Match (New York, 1911), was an international love romance in which a rich young American falls in love with the princess, and about-to-be-queen, of a bit of a kingdom near Spain. Benton, hero, has a rocky road to travel, but he, of course, demolishes every barrier and proves again that love finds a way. The Lighted Match is a rattling good story, and it contains many purple patches between the hiss of the revolutionist's bomb and lovers' sighs. Mr. Buck's latest novel, The Portal of Dreams (New York, 1912), was a very clever story. His first Kentucky novel, and the finest thing he has done, he and his publisher think, is The Strength of Samson, which will appear in four parts in The Cavalier, a weekly magazine, for February, 1913, after which it will be almost immediately published in book form under the title of The Call of the Cumberlands. Mr. Buck's home is at Louisville, Kentucky, but he spends much of his time in New York, where he lives at the Hotel Earle, in Waverly Place, a stone's throw from the apartments of his friend, Thompson Buchanan, the Kentucky playwright.
Bibliography. Harper's Weekly (October 8, 1910); Cosmopolitan Magazine (August, 1911); Who's Who in America (1912-1913).