“Well, if you see one, don’t have anything to do with him. The big yellow and brown ones won’t hurt you; they’re bull-snakes and help to keep the gophers down. Don’t be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in the bank over there. That’s a badger hole. He’s about as big as a big ’possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won’t let the men harm him. In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me when I’m at work.” Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content. The art of Miss Cather shows itself in these sketches of nature faithfully and minutely observed, but pervaded too with a sympathetic emotion. She herself has given us the key of her art, in an article which she wrote when “The Professor’s House” was published. Her ideal in writing, she tells us, would be to have people and things posing before her as they would for painters of still life, like Rembrandt or Chardin, omitting nothing from the background up to the surface. This “still-life” painting is the most correct definition of Miss Cather’s art. Her ambition is to treat style as secondary in respect to the characters. She wants to omit what is only picturesque in order to let people tell their own story, without any comment on her part. She takes a green vase and a yellow orange and puts them side by side on a table. She carefully avoids interfering and relies entirely on the objects thus placed to produce an artistic effect. Let her make the reader _see_ the green vase beside the orange. Nothing else matters. She would like to have the style fused so completely with the object that the reader would not even suspect the former’s existence. The people for whom she writes are those whose chief interest is in the vase and the orange as such, and in the way each lends it color to the other. Here is an original programme of static and intimate realism based upon a scrupulous reproduction of the object, a realism which could not exist without this gift of sympathetic intuition (the Germans call it _Einfühlung_) characteristic of Miss Willa Cather. The art of an Edmond Jaloux, an Edouard Estaunié or a Georges Bernanos would give to a reader familiar with French literature a fairly good understanding of her talent. _Les choses voient_, but they see only for those who can _feel_ them. * * * * *