Mrs. McClung’s ‘community’ depicted in _Sowing Seeds in Danny_ was a little western town, with certain elements of the usual population crossing its pages. The poor immigrant girl, the young English gentleman learning to farm, the doctor, the preacher, the would-be politician are faithfully portrayed. Most interesting of all is Mrs. Watson, the hard-working washerwoman and her family of nine children. The fortunes of Pearlie Watson are the theme of a sequel, _The Second Chance_, in which the setting in a rural settlement, while _The Black Creek Stopping House_ is a collection of short stories. Later the career of Pearl Watson is continued in _Purple Springs_, but this novel shades into a sort of politico-propagandist treatise. Human interest and news quality with a ready-made style to correspond has caught the public interest in Mrs. McClung’s work rather than any conspicuous artistry of method. 2. _The Institutional Novel._ From looking at the life of fixed communities or localities, the next step is to consider them in their relation to what we might call certain ‘institutions’ of our national life, growth, or conditions. We saw that R. E. Knowles in _St. Cuthbert’s_ made the Scottish Presbyterian Church the dominating influence of that story. In this sense, the life of the railroad or construction camp is an ‘institutional’ rather than a local or community life. This has been excellently portrayed by Frank L. Packard in his collection of short stories, _On the Iron at Big Cloud_: Alan Sullivan’s _The Passing of Oul-I-But_ contains some splendid stories of this type. Here also we would place the sea stories of Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace. Norman Duncan’s peculiar field is the ragged coasts and savage seas of Newfoundland and the hard, cruel, tempest-battered life of the Newfoundland fisherman. When _The Way of the Sea_ was published (1904), Frank T. Bullen, himself a master-maker of sea stories, wrote in a foreword: ‘I am absolutely certain that with the exception of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling no writing about the sea has ever probed so deeply and so faithfully into its mysteries as his.’ Duncan’s fidelity to his subject appears not only in his truthful description of the life and way of the sea, but even more in his realization and presentation of the religious side of the Newfoundland fishermen—whose stern creed was born out of a never-ceasing struggle for existence.