_Sarah Orne Jewett._--Sarah Orne Jewett (born in 1849) has written some interesting and even powerful stories of the coast of New England. She was reared at South Berwick, near the Maine coast. While accompanying her father, a physician, on his rounds, she heard from him many local and family histories and traditions. Her first story was “Deephaven” (1877); and she has since written, among others, “Country By-Ways” (1881), eight sketches; “The Mate of the _Daylight_, and Friends Ashore” (1884), short stories and sketches; “A Country Doctor” (1884), “A Marsh Island” (1885), and “A White Heron” (1886), three stories of rural New England; “Strangers and Wayfarers” (1890); “A Native of Winby, and Other Tales” (1893); “The Country of the Pointed Firs” (1896), which contains her most successful character studies; “The Queen’s Twin, and Other Stories” (1899); “The Tory Lover” (1901), a love-story of the Revolution, introducing John Paul Jones, which cannot be pronounced successful. Miss Jewett is at her best in her kindly humorous and sympathetic interpretations of humble but self-respecting New Englanders of the present day. Her humour is healthy and contagious and her style is for the most part simple, clear, and vigorous. _Mrs. Ellen Olney Kirk._--Ellen Olney Kirk (“Henry Hayes,” born in Connecticut in 1842) has been popular as a novelist. She received her education at Stratford, Conn., and was married to John Foster Kirk, the historian, in 1879. Her stories include “Love in Idleness” (1877), “A Lesson in Love” (1883), a study in character, “A Midsummer Madness” (1885), “The Story of Margaret Kent” (1886), “Queen Money” (1888), “The Story of Lawrence Garth” (1894), her best book, in which the difficult character of an adventuress is well drawn, “The Revolt of a Daughter” (1898), “Dorothy Deane” (1899), “Our Lady Vanity” (1901), “The Apology of Ayliffe” (1904), and “Marcia” (1907). The moral in her stories is generally not obtrusive and the humour is genial. _Edward Bellamy._--Edward Bellamy (1850-98), a native of Massachusetts, studied at Union College and in Germany, and in 1871 was admitted to the bar, but devoted his life to journalism and literature. After a year in the Sandwich Islands, in 1878 he published his first novel, “A Nantucket Idyl,” which was followed by “Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process” (1880), in its own way a supremely effective romance, and “Miss Ludington’s Sister, a Romance of Immortality” (1884), none of them very successful with the public. His best known work, “Looking Backward, or 2000-1887” (1888), a Utopian romance, was unexpectedly received as a gospel of socialism; it was widely read and translated into many languages. Much inferior artistically was its sequel, “Equality” (1897). In his best work Bellamy showed a rare gift of romantic portraiture of average types “in the village environment by which he interpreted the heart of the American nation.”