"Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountain from me, well may you cower...." EUNICE TIETJENS. A $10,000 Novel _Diane of the Green Van_, by Leona Dalrymple. [The Reilly and Britton Company, Chicago.] About the middle of last December Mr. F. K. Reilly sent a telegram to a Miss Leona Dalrymple of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he asked: "May I call upon you Thursday afternoon?" The telegram was the result of the $10,000 prize contest which the Reilly and Britton Company had planned early in the year; and Miss Dalrymple had just been announced as the winner by the three judges--S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and George N. Madison. She knew nothing of this, however, though she thought Mr. Reilly's telegram must mean an interest in her work; so she replied calmly that she would be pleased to see him on Thursday. Then Mr. Reilly's eyes begin to twinkle, as he tells the story, for it is rather a joke to set out on a journey with a $10,000 check in your pocket for an unsuspecting young woman. Even when he explained to her and presented the check she remained calm--though she is only twenty-eight years old and this was her first taste of real fame. She told Mr. Reilly that she had another novel which she hoped might interest him--but he took the words out of her mouth by saying that he had come prepared to make a contract for it! So much for the latest of modern fairy tales. _Diane of the Green Van_ is the prize-winning novel, and, despite our first suspicion of it because of that very fact, it proves to be a good one. Miss Dalrymple loves the outdoors, and her present story of an American girl who goes jaunting in a van in the Florida Everglades was suggested by a newspaper clipping about an adventurous young Englishwoman who managed to break away from conventions once a year and roam the country in a gipsy wagon. Not all "best sellers" have as much real charm as this one. Perhaps its freshness and spontaneity are due to the fact that it had to be written in six weeks for the contest.