With the publication of _In the Tennessee Mountains_ came one of the most dramatic happenings that ever gave wings to a new book. Charles Egbert Craddock visited the _Atlantic_ office and, to the amazement of Aldrich and Howells and Dr. Holmes, he was a woman. The sensation, coming as it did from the center of the old New England tradition, gave the book at once an international fame and made Charles Egbert Craddock a name as widely known as Dr. Holmes. She followed her early success with a long series of Tennessee mountain novels. Six of them--_The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains_, _In the Clouds_, _The Despot of Broomsedge Cove_, _His Vanished Star_, _The Mystery of Witchface Mountain_, and _The Juggler_--first appeared serially in the Atlantic, and, for a time at least, it seemed as if her work had taken its place among the American classics. VI Criticism of the Craddock novels must begin always with the statement that their author was not a native of the region with which she dealt. She had been born into an old Southern family with wealth and traditions, and she had been reared in a city amid culture and a Southern social régime. The Tennessee mountains she knew only as a summer visitor may know them. For fifteen summers she went to the little mountain town of Beersheba, prototype undoubtedly of the "New Helvetia Springs" of her novels, and from there made excursions into the wilder regions. She saw the mountains with the eyes of the city vacationist: she was impressed with their wildness, their summer moods with light and shadow, their loneliness and their remote spurs and coves and ragged gaps. She saw them with the picture sense of the artist and she described them with a wealth of coloring that reminds one of Ruskin. In every chapter, often many times repeated, gorgeous paintings like these: A subtle amethystine mist had gradually overlaid the slopes of the T'other Mounting, mellowing the brilliant tints of the variegated foliage to a delicious hazy sheen of mosaics; but about the base the air seemed dun-colored, though transparent; seen through it, even the red of the crowded trees was but a somber sort of magnificence, and the great masses of gray rocks, jutting out among them here and there, wore a darkly frowning aspect. Along the summit there was a blaze of scarlet and gold in the full glory of the sunshine; the topmost cliffs caught its rays, and gave them back in unexpected gleams of green or grayish-yellow, as of mosses, or vines, or huckleberry bushes, nourished in the heart of the deep fissures.