When Jap Herron was elected Mayor of Bloomtown, and the girl he loved had walked right into his astonished arms, it seemed to us that the story must be ended. We had forgotten that Jap ever had a family of his own, a mother and two sisters, and when the drunken hag reeled into the _Herald_ office we were as greatly horrified as Jap himself was. I had put my husband's carefully kept copy into type-written form, and it occurred to me to get the opinion of a master critic on the story, not as evidence of the survival of the human mind after physical death, but as pure fiction. Acting upon the impulse, and without telling either my husband or Mrs. Hays what I intended to do, I took the copy to William Marion Reedy,[1] permitting him to infer that I had created it, and asked him to tell me whether, in his judgment, the story was worth finishing. It was the beginning of the week, when the issuing of the _Mirror_ consumed all his time, and while I was waiting for his verdict we received three more chapters. In the first of these we had a new light on Isabel Granger's character, and came for the first time absolutely to love Bill Bowers. After that nothing that Bill might do would shake our faith in his ability to make good in the end. He might be weak and foolish, but we understood why Jap believed in and loved him. We were jubilant when Rosy Raymond was eliminated from the game, for we feared, whenever we permitted ourselves to speculate, that Bill would marry her, and regret the step. We assumed that the son of the much-married Judge Bowers had inherited a nature sufficiently mobile to recover from the shock of the silly girl's perfidy. While this unexpected development of the story was being revealed to us, William Marion Reedy sent me, in the envelope with the first ten chapters of "Jap Herron," a criticism that fairly made me tingle with delight. Had the work been my own, I could not have been more pleased with his unstinted praise. I wanted to go to him at once and confess the truth; but he was not in his office when I called.