Harriet Beecher Stowe did for her country more than one inestimable service that should win for her the gratitude of her countrymen. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” besides being a clarion call to the world, happened also to be a book that was to become immortal. This was incidental; but it was not a small thing to do--thus to focus the attention of the whole world upon one American book. And it was no small service to the literary life and hopes of this country to write a book that should, as Sir Arthur Helps said, “insist on being read when once begun.” On the wave of a great enthusiasm of pity and love, her name was carried around the globe. Therefore, it is not too much to say that it was because of her that the famous British taunt, “Who reads an American book?” has now been answered, “Everybody!” But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” although the most famous, was not the only book that Mrs. Stowe wrote. On the contrary, it was one of a long series of novels, some of which are to be specially valued for their historical import and some to be read for the sheer enjoyment of the pictures of life drawn in them. Mrs. Stowe was a great story-teller, a true raconteur. The story flows from her pen with a delightful smoothness and ease. In her later books she turned with a very glad and loving heart to the portrayal of scenes such as she had known in her girlhood and of the native and unique spirit of that life which was as the very marrow of her bones. We cannot be sufficiently thankful that the old-fashioned Thanksgiving, the quilting-bee, and the wood-spell survived to the year when the seeing eye and the recording memory came to the Connecticut parsonage in the person of Harriet Beecher. To every one that values those elements of our national character that were formed in the struggles of the heroic Pilgrim fathers and mothers in the wilderness and their inspired successors, this part of Mrs. Stowe’s writing ought to be doubly precious. Her work in the books that describe early New England life is a gift that every impulse in us of patriotic reverence should leap to acknowledge. It will be remembered that in her first book of stories, “The Mayflower,” she drew from the rich field that was her native heath. _Uncle Tim_, the hero of her very first story, was a living, breathing expression of the New England spirit, and the town, the church, the ways, the turns and queernesses of speech were of immortal simplicity and truth to life. Scattered through the stories in that book are found little character sketches of amazing vividness. How she makes us see these solemn and important brethren in the church! Here they are, _Deacon Enos Dudley_, solemn as an ancient Israelite, and, for contrast, the brisk little _Deacon Abrams_, who came to a meeting to manage things and to see that everything went off rightly!