The setting is an important part of Allen's stories. He describes with the graphic touch of a true nature lover the witchery of Kentucky's fallow meadows, the beauty of her hempfields, the joys of a June day. A noisy conflict could not occur in the restful garden of _The Kentucky Cardinal_, while in the frontier garden of Mrs. Falconer, in _The Choir Invisible_, the ambitious, fiery John Gray seems not out of harmony because the presence of the adjacent wild forest affects the entire scene. In one way or another, the landscapes, by preparing the reader for the moods of the characters, play a part in all of Allen's novels. He is a master of the art that holds together scenes and actions. His descriptive powers are unusual, and his style is highly wrought. It is more that of the literary essayist than of the simple narrator, and it is full of poetic touches, delicate suggestions, and refined art. MARY N. MURFREE (CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK), 1850- Miss Mary Noailles Murfree, better known as Charles Egbert Craddock, was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1850. For fifteen years she spent her summers in the Tennessee mountains among the people of whom she writes. Her pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock deceived her publishers into the belief that she was a man. Both Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich accepted her stories for the _Atlantic Monthly_ without suspecting her sex, and Aldrich was a surprised man the day she entered his office and introduced herself as Charles Egbert Craddock. The stories that suggested to her editors a masculine hand are lively recitals of family feuds, moonshiners' raids, circuit court sessions, fights over land grants, discoveries of oil, and many similar incidents, which make up the life of a people separated from the modern world by almost inaccessible mountains. The rifle is used freely by this people, and murder is frequent, but honor and bravery, daring and sacrifice, are not absent, and Craddock finds among the women, as well as the men, examples of magnanimity and heroism that thrill the reader. [Illustration: MARY N. MURFREE (Charles Egbert Craddock)] The presence of the mountains is always imminent, and seems to impress the lives of the people in some direct way. To Cynthia Ware, for instance, in the story, _Drifting Down Lost Creek_, Pine Mountain seems to stand as a bar to all her ambitions and dreams:--