The failure of Charles Egbert Craddock came rather from her inability to work with large masses of material and coördinate it and shape it into a culminating force. She was picturesque rather than penetrating, melodramatic rather than simple, a showman rather than a discerning interpreter of the inner meanings of life. She could make vivid sketches of a moment or of a group or a landscape, but she could not build up touch by touch a consistent and compelling human character. Her genius was fitted to express itself in the short story and the sketch, and she devoted the golden years of her productive life to the making of elaborate novels. A little story like "'Way Down on Lonesome Cove" is worth the whole of the _The Juggler_ or _In the Clouds_. The short stories with which she won her first fame must stand as her highest achievement. VII Later members of the Georgia group, Sarah Barnwell Elliott, Harry Stillwell Edwards, and William Nathaniel Harben, have continued the tradition of Longstreet and have dealt more or less realistically with the humbler life of their region. Miss Elliott with her _The Durket Sperrit_ entered the domain of Charles Egbert Craddock and gave a new version of the mountain dialect. A comparison of this novel with _The Juggler_, which appeared the same year, is illuminating. The two writers seem to be complements of each other, the one strong where the other is weak. The story lacks the atmosphere, the poetic dignity, the sense of mystery and of mountain majesty so notable in the elder novelist, but it surpasses her in characterization and in sympathy. The people are tremendously alive. The tyrannical old woman about whom the tale centers, with her narrow ideals and her haughty "Durket sperrit," dominates every page as Egdon Heath dominates _The Return of the Native_. She is felt during every moment of the story and so is the pathetic little mountain waif in the earlier chapters of _Jerry_. Miss Elliott's distinctive work is limited to these two books. Had she had the courage to work out with clearness the central tragedy of _The Durket Sperrit_, the deliberate disgracing of Hannah by her discarded lover, the book might take its place among the few great novels of the period. Edwards inclined more toward the old Georgia type of human-nature sketch. His best work is to be found in his short studies in black and white after the Johnston pattern. Indeed, his first story, "Elder Brown's Backslide," _Harper's Monthly_, 1885, without his name would have been regarded as a Dukesborough Tale. He has written two novels, one of which, _Sons and Fathers_, was awarded the $10,000 prize offered by the _Chicago Record_ for a mystery story, but he is not a novelist. He is humorous and picturesque and often he is for a moment the master of pathos, but he has added nothing new and nothing commandingly distinctive. VIII