In nearly all of Miss Dawson’s work that I have seen is an elusive something defying analysis, even description—something that is not in the words. I do not know how she gets it where it is; I never could either surprise her secret by swift strokes of attention, come upon it by patient still-hunting, nor in any way get at the trick of it. I can name it only in metaphor as a light behind the words; a light like that of Poe’s “red litten eves”; a light such as falls at sunset upon desolate marshes, tingeing the plumage of the tall heron and prophesying the joyless laugh of the loon. That selfsame light shines somewhere through and under Doré’s long parallel cloud-bands along his horizons, and I have seen it, with an added bleakness, backgrounding the tall rood in the Lone Mountain cemetery of San Francisco. I dare say it is all very easy—to Miss Dawson: she simply writes and some “remote, unfriended, melancholy” ancestor stands by to “do the rest.” The publication of Miss Dawson’s _An Itinerant House and Other Stories_ is an event, doubtless, which does not seem at present—at least not to that cave-bat, “the general reader”—to cut much of a figure, but I shall miss my guess if it do not hold attention when Father Time has much that the world admires snugly tucked away in his wallet—“alms for oblivion.” This is a guess only: I am not a believer in the doctrine that good literary work has some inherent quality compelling recognition and conferring vitality. Good literary work, like anything else, endures if the conditions favor, perishes if they do not; so my guess, upon examination, dwindles to a hope compounded of rather more desire than expectation. Miss Dawson’s book is not to be judged as other books. It will help the reader to a just appreciation of this wonderful woman’s work in letters if he understand beforehand that the world she sees is not the world we see; that her men and women are as unearthly as their environment, making no demands whatever on our sympathies, our affections, our admiration. Indeed, she cares nothing for them herself, putting an end to their strange, unhuman existence when done with them as indifferently as a tired player removes the chessmen from board to box. This, for example, is how she disposes of a few that have become superfluous: “Mrs. Anson proved a hard-faced, cold-hearted Cape Cod woman, a scold and drudge, who hated us as much as we disliked her. Homesick and unhappy, she soon went East and died. Within a year Anson was found dead where he had gone hunting in the Saucelito woods, supposed a suicide; Dering was hung by the Vigilantes and the rest were scattered on the four winds.” But when Miss Dawson’s narrative flows with a loitering current you may commonly hear the sound of slow music and get glimpses of a darkened stage.