In fiction form, this is a condensed story of the life of Lincoln as told, by way of reminiscence, by Billy Brown, in his drugstore on the public square of Springfield, Illinois, and while his listener was seated opposite him in “Lincoln’s chair.” It brings out the salient features of Lincoln’s life before he went to Washington, his views on God, and their influence on his intellectual development, his early experiences as a lawyer, and his political progress.
Booklist 16:314 Je ’20 Cleveland p71 Ag ’20 50w
“Must a saint or hero be all sugar, without spice or salt? Miss Ida M. Tarbell seems to think so still more in her imaginary conversation ‘In Lincoln’s chair’ than she did a dozen years ago in ‘He knew Lincoln.’ The moment she leaves the cold path of history she falls into the most abandoned myth-making.”
− Nation 110:662 My 15 ’20 160w
TARN, WILLIAM WOODTHORPE. Treasure of the isle of mist. *$1.90 (5c) Putnam
20–1903
This is a delightfully fantastic story of a student and his little daughter Fiona who lived on the Isle of mist on the shores of a gray sea-loch. The old hawker who came to them with a pack of buttons to sell and who gave Fiona an old copper bangle bracelet, and the “search” turned out in the end to have been the king of fairies. The bracelet gave Fiona the power to talk with animals—to hold long philosophic conversations with a centipede—and to see and talk with the spirit of the mountain. But it was not only on account of the bracelet that she could do this but—because she was a child and could still see. When the treasure cave was closed up to her by a great fall of rock she knew that now she was too old for the search. The chapters are headed: The gift of the search; The beginning of trouble; The haunted cave; The urchin vanishes; The oread; The king of the woodcock; Fiona in the fairy-world; Fiona finds her treasure.
“Delicately imaginative and beautifully written.”