_Archibald Clavering Gunter._--Archibald Clavering Gunter (1847-1907), a native of Liverpool who became a California mining and civil engineer, chemist, and stock-broker, at forty began to write novels which violated most of the literary canons, but which in plot and incident were of absorbing interest. It was his avowed rule to make something happen in every five hundred words. This explains why a million copies of his first novel, “Mr. Barnes of New York” (1887), have been sold. He wrote thirty-nine novels in all, the best of which, in addition to his first, are “Mr. Potter of Texas” (1888), “That Frenchman” (1889), “Jack Curzon” (1899), and “A Manufacturer’s Daughter” (1901). He also became well known as a playwright. _Octave Thanet._--Octave Thanet is the well known pen name of Alice French (born at Andover, Massachusetts, in 1850), who has achieved enviable success in her short stories of life in Iowa and Arkansas, a field in which she has few rivals. These stories include “Knitters in the Sun” (1887), “Expiation” (1890), vigorous, truly coloured, and accurate in details, “Stories of a Western Town” (1893), Iowa sketches, “The Missionary Sheriff” (1897), and “The Heart of Toil” (1898), full of the pathos of an unequal struggle with economic forces. Miss French writes sympathetically, with her eyes on the men and women who furnish her with characters. _Margaret Deland._--One of the most popular of living novelists, and justly so, is Mrs. Margaret Deland. Born Margaretta Campbell, in 1857, in Manchester, now a part of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, then a village “of dignified houses, pleasant gardens, and meadows sloping to a picturesque river,” she was left an orphan at three and was cared for by an aunt. At sixteen, like Mrs. Foote, she entered a class in drawing and design in Cooper Institute, New York; she graduated at the head of her class, and won an appointment as instructor in design in the Girls’ Normal College, a post which she filled till 1880. Then she was married to Mr. Lorin F. Deland and went to Boston. Eight years later appeared her first novel, “John Ward, Preacher.” It is the story of the conflict of rigid Calvinism and modern liberalism, and it has been compared with Mrs. Ward’s “Robert Elsmere.” Two love-stories, one of which recalls Mrs. Gaskell’s “Cranford,” relieve the tragic gloom of the narrative. Ashurst is an idealised Manchester. In “Sidney” (1890) the author studies the question of the value of mortal sexual love; the problems of faith and doubt also recur. “The Story of a Child” (1892) delineates an uncontrolled imagination. “Mr. Tommy Dove, and Other Stories” (1893) is a collection including typical humour and pathos. “Philip and His Wife” (1894) has to do with an unhappy marriage. Her recent stories are “The Wisdom of Fools” (1898), “Old Chester Tales” (1899), “Dr. Lavendar’s People” (1904), and “The Awakening of Helena Richie” (1906). Big-hearted, shrewd Dr. Lavendar, who figures in her last two