tions were essays and sketches, and then he passed to story-writing for Harper's Magazine and the Century. His stories were idealized narratives and descriptions of life in the Blue Grass Region of Kentucky, which he knew so intimately. These were followed by several novels which established his reputation as one of the foremost contemporary writers of prose fiction.

His Works. Allen's first volume of stories, Flute and Violin, was published in 1891; then followed A Kentucky Cardinal

in the first volume and the prose idyl, A Kentucky Cardinal, are probably the most popular of his works, while The Choir Invisible is his strongest novel.

The scene of Allen's stories, long and short, is the wonderfully beautiful Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky around Lexington, where he spent his most impressionable years. The rich pastures, with their clumps of shade trees and grazing cattle

and blooded horses; the limpid streams winding through the meadows; the fragrant clover-fields of early summer and the hazy hemp fields of autumn; the luxuriant cornfields and the waving stretches of golden wheat in June; the white roads, or "pikes," across the rolling landscape, forming a network of communication; the old stone fences guarding the highway, English fashion: all these outward features, together with the full, free life, of that enchanting spot, are ideally portrayed in this Kentuckian's books. Here is a bit of poetic coloring:

They are all mine-these Kentucky wheat fields. After the owner has taken from them his last sheaf, I come in and gather my harvest also— one that he did not see, and doubtless would not begrudge me—the harvest of beauty. Or I walk beside tufted aromatic hemp-fields, as along the shores of softly foaming emerald seas; or part the rank and file of fields of Indian corn, which stand like armies that had gotten ready to march, but been kept waiting for further orders, until at last the soldiers had gotten tired, as the gayest will, of their yellow plumes and green ribbons, and let their big hands fall heavily down at their sides. There the white and the purple morning-glories hang their long festoons and open to the soft midnight winds their elfin trumpets.

The delightful novelettes, A Kentucky Cardinal and its sequel, Aftermath, are pastoral idyls, poems in prose: the singing and fate of the red bird, the wooing of the lovers, the ripening strawberries, give to this garden story, in which heart and mind are changed by love and nature, an atmosphere all its own. In A Summer in Arcady the high tide of summer suggests reflections on the subtle connection between the physical forces of nature and human instincts and passions, a sort of prelude to the perplexing problems raised in The Reign of Law. In human interest, however, such a story as "King Solomon of Kentucky," found in Flute and Violin, far surpasses all other shorter stories of James Lane Allen. The scene is in the Lexington of 1833, when the cholera left its ravages upon that fair town. The hitherto worthless vagabond, called in mockery "King Solomon," reaches the depths of his humilia

tion on the public square when he is auctioned off to the highest bidder, but finds his redemption in a service of supreme heroism to the community in the dark days of the plague. It is one of the great short stories of American literature.

The Choir Invisible has great human interest also. It is a romantic tale of pioneer times in Kentucky, and it opens on a "fragrant afternoon of May" in the year 1795. The hero is John Gray, a country schoolteacher, who is no doubt in part drawn from the author himself. The real heroine is Mrs. Faulkner, a noble type of womanhood; between the two is sympathy of mind and heart. In the old book of Arthur and the Round Table, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, they read, but love is unconfessed, and each obeys the higher law of duty, which is sometimes the hand of fate and tragedy. The fight with the panther in the schoolroom is a thrilling incident such as one seldom finds in Allen's works.

He is, indeed, preeminently a painter of quiet scenes and an analyst of inner motives. There is comparatively little action in his stories, and his plots are not complex. The restrained tragedy of certain situations, the humanness of a landscape, and the fateful determination of character, suggest Thomas Hardy, without, however, the general somberness of that novelist. Allen's landscapes are the smiling blue-grass pastures idealized and humanized, and his stories are prose idyls artistically done in choice musical English.

THOMAS NELSON PAGE (1853-)

His Life. Thomas Nelson Page was born at Oakland Plantation in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1853. He was educated at Washington and Lee University, entering the institution during the presidency of General Robert E. Lee. After leaving college in 1872, he tutored for a while in a private family near Louisville, Kentucky. Then he entered the Law School of the University of Virginia, from which he graduated in 1874. Between 1875 and 1893 he practised law in Richmond. Meanwhile he had written many stories of old Virginia life and become famous. He was in demand as a lecturer and as a reader of his own stories, which

he interpreted with great success. Since 1893 Mr. Page has lived in Washington and has given himself entirely to literary work. In 1913 he was appointed Ambassador to Italy by President Wilson, who in so doing revived the fine old traditions of our earlier diplomacy when Irving, Hawthorne, and Lowell served their country abroad.

His Works.-Thomas Nelson Page began his literary career by writing stories and sketches for the newspapers, as did also Cable and Harris. His first great short story, "Marse Chan," was written in 1880, but was not published until 1884, when it appeared in Scribner's Magazine, after remaining in the office of that periodical for four years. It was received with universal praise. Other stories followed in rapid succession; all were collected in a single volume, published in 1887 under the title of In Ole Virginia. Three of them have become classics "Marse Chan," "Meh Lady," and "Unc' Edinburg's

Drowndin'." This volume, indeed, has held its place as the author's most popular and characteristic work. Other books, in the order of publication, are-Two Little Confederates (1888), On New Found River (1891), Elsket and Other Stories (1891), The Old South (1892), Social Life in Old Virginia (1897), Red Rock (1898), Gordon Keith (1903), a life of Robert E. Lee, and other volumes.

While Page has written dialect poems, essays, and biography, it is as a writer of stories on life in the South, or to be more specific, in Virginia, before and during the war and immediately thereafter, that he has won permanent fame. How they lived on the old plantations, how loyal the darkies were to their masters and mistresses in war time, and how Virginia suffered in the dark reconstruction days, these are the themes on which he is most at home. No one is better fitted to write on this general subject than Thomas Nelson Page, descendant of an old and distinguished Virginia family, whose traditions touch much that is best in the political, intellectual, and social history of the Old Dominion. With the scenes he describes, some of which center about his native plantation home, he was familiar in one way or another, and from his boyhood he was an entertaining story-teller. With irresistible pathos and humor he has depicted the negro of slave days in his relation to his master; he has shown in artistic fashion the kindly feeling, amounting often to active sympathy, between them; and he has shown the heroism of servant and master and mistress in those times that tried men's souls.

These charming stories, of which "Marse Chan" and "Meh Lady" are typical, are usually told by a faithful negro whose affections for the family have not been changed by the new relationship. To him the days "befo de war" were the golden days; and when the struggle, the inevitable conflict, came, he also turned out to be a hero through his unfaltering devotion to "Marse Chan" or to "Marse Phil" and his family. Pathos and humor are close together in the pictures of the old order; the