'The Old Post Road,' a short, stirring tale of love and highway robbery,' and 'The Ghost of Dred Power,' a story of barely a hundred pages, with a skilfully constructed plot and scenes shifting from the present on the plains of Texas to the past on the battle-fields of the Civil War, are both more interesting and more successful.

In 'Princess' the scene is laid on an old plantation on the James River below Richmond, and attractive glimpses are given of the ancient mansion and of life on the plantation. But the discussion of divorce, though recast at the suggestion of the publisher, is not altogether pleasant, and the love scenes are overdrawn.

'Jean Monteith' is a story of a daughter's self-sacrificing devotion to the memory of her father. Many of the scenes give an impression of unreality and unnaturalness. Yet not a few pictures of the mountains and woods in the stillness of a summer's day and in the bursting of a sudden storm linger clearly in the memory. Danvers, the mountaineer, rough, but honest and warm-hearted, is one of the best characters in the book.

'A Self-Made Man' is by far the best of her novels. Edward Jackson Anthony, the son of a former overseer on the Beverley estate, having gone West in his youth, returns to Virginia a millionaire, and concealing his identity, buys the old Beverley place. He falls in love with Mrs. Beverley, a widow, and former owner of the estate. But the social barrier is too strong. He sees himself supplanted by a friend. There is a brief, well depicted struggle between hatred and friendship. Friendship conquers. Quietly he disappears to bury himself again in the great West, and leaves to his friend and the woman they both love a handsome sum with which to begin their married life. The conclusion of the story reveals a finer artistic touch, a greater self-restraint, and more freedom from the melodramatic than any other of Miss McClelland's novels. The characters are more varied, more interesting, and more true to life: Anthony with his energy, honesty, sturdy self-respect, liberality, and rough kindliness, counterbalanced by his coarseness, commercialism, and pride in his own career; Mrs. Beverley, refined, high-spirited, generous; her two little boys, Ran and Hector, full of mischief and boyish energy; Miss Cornelia, a narrow, prejudiced old maid; and finally the old negroes with their devotion to "Ol' Miss" and their dread of the "po'-house."

Yet it is doubtful whether Miss McClelland has contributed to Southern literature any character that will live. Her talent lay, not so much in subtle analysis or delineation of character, or in skilful development of plot, as in sympathetic, truthful portrayal of scenes of Southern life; traveling on the James River Canal; a cypress

swamp in Louisiana; a mountain flood in North Carolina; plantation life on the lower James; and negro customs and superstitions.

Miss McClelland's style, though as a rule natural and easy, is sometimes marked by affectation and vagueness. Instead of a wedding journey we read of "the usual nuptial progression." Dying an early death is characterized as "tossing into the infinite in a halo of beauty and youth." Again we read of "A sympathy which almost amounted to divination jostling obtusities that just escaped brutishness." Such crudities of style, however, are the exception rather than the rule. The foregoing examples occur in 'Mammy Mystic,' a posthumous volume which doubtless escaped revision by the author.

Although Miss McClelland as an artist can hardly be ranked with Charles Egbert Craddock and Ruth McEnery Stuart, she must nevertheless be classed with them as a woman who, devoted to her profession, bore her modest and not altogether unimportant part in the literary awakening of the South.

John M. McBryde, Jr.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Old Ike's Memories. Richmond, Virginia, West, Johnson and Company, 1884.

Oblivion. Henry Holt and Company, 1885.

Princess. Henry Holt and Company, 1886.

Jean Monteith. Henry Holt and Company, 1887.

A Self-Made Man. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1887.

Madam Sylva and the Ghost of Dred Power. New York, Cassell and Company, 1888.

Burkett's Lock. New York, Cassell and Company, 1889 (copyrighted 1888).

The Bite That Kills. New York, S. H. Moore and Company, 1891. Manitou Island. Henry Holt and Company, 1892.

Broadoaks. St. Paul, Minnesota, The Price-McGill Company, 1893. The Old Post Road. New York, The Merriam Company, 1894. St. John's Wooing. Harper and Brothers, 1895 (copyrighted

December 5, 1894).

Mammy Mystic. The Merriam Company, 1895.
Sam. Philadelphia, Henry Altemus Company, 1906.

Ten Minutes to Twelve. Lippincott's Magazine, July, 1889, pp. 1-64.

Mollie. Harper's Monthly, August, 1889.

My Love. Poem. Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1889. The Tragedy of Humpback. Harper's Monthly, April, 1890. That Hound of Joel Trout. Lippincott's Magazine, May, 1891, pp. 589-603.

Touch and Go. Lippincott's Magazine, March, 1892, pp. 366-370. White Heron. Lippincott's Magazine, July, 1892, pp. 1-76.

Sam. Youth's Companion, October 5, 1893, et seq. (afterward published in book form by Henry Altemus Company, Philadelphia, 1906).

Taking Him Home. Youth's Companion, February 8, 1894. Wonder Witch. Lippincott's Magazine, June, 1894, pp. 713-779. The Ventriloquist. Youth's Companion, April 9, 1896, et seq. A Soul New-Risen. Youth's Companion, April 7, 1896, et seq. The Touch of a Vanished Hand. Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1898, pp. 297-329.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL

Charles W. Coleman, Harper's Monthly, 74, 851; C. W. Coleman and others, Literature, John B. Alden, publisher, New York, October 13, 1888, pp. 385-404; 'Library of American Literature,' Stedman and Hutchinson, 11, 267-271; 553.

[The biographical sketch of Miss McClelland is based almost entirely on details furnished by her sister, Mrs. W. H. Whelan of Norwood, Virginia.]

A REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

From 'A Self-Made Man.' Copyright, J. B. Lippincott Company, and used here by permission of the publishers.

THE "Overseer" class of the South in ante-bellum days. constituted as distinct a grade as can be found in any country where birth, not wealth, is the standard of respectability. From the higher class their employers-they were removed by ignorance and poverty; from the lower-their chargesby race-instinct.

There was no antagonism between the inhabitants of the large house where the proprietor lived and the inhabitants of the small house in which dwelt his prime minister, such as appears to exist between the rich and poor of other sections. Nor was there any effort on the part of the upper class to keep the lower down, or to hinder members of it from acquiring knowledge or property. On the contrary, there existed between the two great amity and friendliness, and in some instances, where the tie was of long standing between employer and employed, a sort of feudal feeling which led the one to yield protection and cordial liking, and the other an admiring respect and loyal, if lazy, service.

It is no uncommon thing even yet in the South to hear one man say of another, "I've knowed him all my life. My father was his father's overseer 'way back in slavery times. They are right down clever people, his folks are: we allus liked 'em mighty well." The liking was generally mutual; and that the "overseer" class of the South remained so long, and remains still, in a great measure, in a lower position is due partly to their own willingness, partly to the habit of subordination.

Across the ravine from the Beverley mansion, beyond a little stretch of woods, stood a settlement of cabins which had formerly been occupied by slaves belonging to the estate. Some of the houses had fallen into partial or total ruin, but a few were still inhabited, as was shown by the curling smoke ascending from their chimneys. Above them, nearer the crest of the hill, stood the overseer's house-a neat building of hewn logs, with a rough porch in front, and still in a good state of preservation.

It had been occupied by a family of white tenants at the time when this portion of the Beverley plantation passed into other hands; but the lawyer, in obedience to instructions received from the new proprietor, had moved them out and had the house done up a little. Not that Ned Anthony cherished any sentiment connected with the house in which he had been born; on the contrary, he considered it emphatically "a doghole;" but he was a practical fellow and well used to roughing it, and thought that the "old shanty" would do well enough to live in for a month or so while he should run up a decent house; that is, if he should decide to make any sojourn in Virginia.

Anthony stood in one of the rooms, whistling softly, and looking about him, one morning about a week after the night on which he had renewed his acquaintance (as he thought) with his old play fellow through the parlor window. The next day he had gone down to Richmond to order some things he needed for his temporary establishment, and to talk to a contractor about putting up a house for him in case he should decide to "stop on the ranch" for a year or so. He was not a man that ever let the grass grow under his feet.

Standing in the middle of the old room, the past got hold of him somehow, and pushed its way through the hard crust of the outer man to the sanctuary which even the roughest of us keep somewhere about our anatomy for the refuge of a few tender associations-our youth, our homes and mothers, the girl, perhaps, whose eyes gave us our first heart-ache.

Old Mrs. Anthony had not been in any way a show-figure. She was tall, and spare of limb, and slow of speech and gait; her eyes were sad, and her thin sallow face had rather a mournful expression. She wore rough clothes, and a kerchief folded cornerwise over her grizzled hair, and smoked a corncob pipe in the intervals of her labors; but she was a good woman, a faithful, dutiful wife, and a devoted and selfsacrificing mother, kind and gentle and patient, and indulgent to her offspring, as women of her class usually are. Her son-her youngest-born-had loved her, and it was of her alone he was thinking as he stood by the hearth-stone and looked at the corner where her spinning-wheel and her old split-bottomed rocking-chair used to stand. Poor old mother!