An astonished city awoke one morning to find that Cordelia Vaughan was a poetess. For some time it had been rumored persistently about that the beautiful young authoress from Kentucky was soon to place a new and wonderful novel of modern life and manners before the reading world. At a time, too, when the talk of her play was on every tongue, the public press was seldom without an anticipatory note or two about Cordelia's next effort. But when, instead of either novel or study, the Sunday issue of a commendably enterprising New York newspaper came out with her now well-known The Need of War, those admiring followers--and they were, indeed, no small army--whom she had won over by the strength and charm of her first book, turned to one another bewildered and asked what new token of versatility and genius this wonderful girl writer from the South would next fling before them. The Need of War, with a striking portrait of its author in a black velvet and Irish point gown, a loose Russian coat of pale gray Venetian cloth, surmounted by an immense plumed hat of beaver, occupied, with a luridly symbolic figure of "War" in the background, an entire page of the newspaper in which it first appeared. While The Need of War was, perhaps, slightly above the heads of the audience to which that particular journal appealed, the more discerning critics and paragraphers soon saw that the poem was in reality an emotional and vitalized appreciation of the divinity of struggle, and, seeming to strike, as it did, the key-note of our American strenuous life, the lines crept from city to city, appeared by special arrangement in one of the popular magazines, and eventually percolated throughout the country. The power and vigor of the flowing blank verse could not be denied--in fact, there were those who regarded it as remarkable that such metrical skill could be shown by a hand unknown to years of patient and laborious exercise. The beauty of the poem, however, continued to evoke comment from the press, and even those more academic periodicals which had not deigned to take notice of her earlier work in the field of prose now opened their pages to an occasional discussion of Cordelia Vaughan's new treatment of an old problem. It all resulted in a very unlooked-for shower of newspaper articles from Cordelia's clipping agency. These told in many incongruously different ways just how the poem came to be written, just what its author had planned it should mean, and just how remarkable it was that the thundering forth of such a sermon should fall to the lot of a young and fragile American girl.