situated the _Women's Village_ (1900), all the men of which seek their livelihood overseas, so that all the women swarm about the only man left at home, a cripple. The novel _John Miller_ (1903) treats the tragedy of a rich man of the Eifel who goes to ruin in pride and blind presumption; _The Cross in the Venn_ (1908) deals with the religious life of this district. The scene of the novel _The Watch on the Rhine_ (1902) is Düsseldorf, where the difficult process of amalgamation between Prussians and Rhinelanders, first accomplished in 1870, is illustrated in the wedded life of a Prussian sergeant and the daughter of a Düsseldorf innkeeper. The struggle of racial incompatibilities which is here depicted with the most matter-of-fact objectivity, and which in a series of merry _genre_ pictures is brought to a happy conclusion, is carried in another work to a frightfully serious tragic ending. _The Sleeping Host_ (1904) takes us to the Prussian province of Posen and shows the effect of strife between German and Slavic elements, in the fate of Rhenish immigrants whose efforts to found a new home for themselves are brought to naught. A second novel of the eastern frontier, _Absolvo Te_ (1907), is inferior to the first, not in power of characterization, but in range of subject. Still a third work treats the problem of a difference between blood and rearing, _A Mother's Son_ (1906). The novel traces the development of the son of a peasant woman of the Eifel who has been adopted by a Berlin family and in whom, in spite of careful education, the evil disposition of his father comes to the surface. In this artificial treatment of the theory of heredity Clara Viebig's art does not appear to the best advantage; her forte is rather unbiased objectivity and penetrating observation of every-day life. The other novels having their scene in Berlin are distinguished for a keen sense for realities, as, for example, _The Daily Bread_ (1900), a treatment of the servant question which in the technique of Zola gives a panorama of the metropolis and of life in the lower strata. A rise above the level of naturalism may be noted in the fact that the last two novels of this author do not deal with the present but, like _The Watch on the Rhine_, revert to themes in the history of social development. _Those without the Gates_ (1910) depicts the fate of the suburbanites who are submerged in the gigantic organism of the growing city; the latest novel, _Iron in the Fire_ (1913), has for its subject the time from 1848 to 1866, the time of expectation; an old-fashioned Berlin smithy is the scene, the fire in the forge and the power behind the hammer are symbols of the growth of the nation. Only in the dim background does the figure of Bismarck appear, the smith who welded the parts of the empire into one; it is characteristic of Clara Viebig's art that she allows great historical events to be mirrored only in the little world of the actors in her little drama, whereas