Mr. Harris's work is done at his home in West End, one of the suburbs of Atlanta, and few visitors are permitted to interrupt him. Not that he is gruff; he is simply retiring. He prefers to be known by his books. They who know him intimately--and they are not many--say that he is remarkably kind and hospitable. We respect his desire for privacy. We will not even knock on the door and beg one glimpse of his private life. With the whole reading public we shall be content to note his boundless cheerfulness and rare enjoyableness as a story-teller. [Illustration: DR. S. WEIR MITCHELL.] S. WEIR MITCHELL About sixty years ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, taking dinner one night in Philadelphia with his friend, Dr. John K. Mitchell, was so pleased with one of Dr. Mitchell's boys, by name Silas Weir, then a little more than ten years old, that he gave the boy a copy of his famous ballad on the frigate Constitution. Some seventeen years later, in 1856, when Silas was a young doctor, with a brand-new degree, he showed Dr. Holmes a book of poems which he hoped to have published. Dr. Holmes advised the young man to put the poems away until he was forty, and then to reconsider his determination to have them published. "The publication of these verses at this time," said the genial but shrewd Autocrat, "will do you no good. They will not help you in your life as a physician, and they cannot stand alone." The soundness of Dr. Holmes's judgment was later proved by the circumstance that the young man blossomed into one of the most distinguished physicians of his time. Dr. Mitchell's volume of poems, "The Hill of Stones," published about four years ago, contains just one of the poems offered to the Boston poet in 1856, namely, "Herndon." As an author, Dr. Mitchell is less celebrated than his friendly counsellor; but as a doctor he is far more celebrated than was Dr. Holmes in his palmiest days. S. Weir Mitchell, one of the six sons of Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, was born in Philadelphia on February 16, 1829. His father was then a leader in his profession. He was one of the first Americans to investigate scientifically "animal magnetism," as hypnotism was called in the early part of the last century; and, moreover, he was a highly valued contributor to the medical periodicals of the day. It is noteworthy that he had a taste for literature. Two of his lyrics, "The Old Song and the New Song" and "Prairie Lea," had a wide popularity in their day.