“I went to the little district school until I was perhaps fourteen and then went to the ‘Robinson Female Seminary,’ Exeter, walking back and forth every day except in the winter months, and there I was graduated--after which I taught several years, in the country and in Boston, hating it more and more every minute, and then threw over my certainty to write. “I did a little work on the _Christian Register_ and then went to the _Youth’s Companion_, where, for years, I ground out stuff from the latest books and magazines. “And that’s really all! I own a farm here at Hill, which I don’t carry on--sell the grass standing and the apples on the trees. I love gardens and houses. I wish I could go round planning the resurrection of old houses and pass them over to somebody else and plan more. “And _that’s_ all! Now I ask you if any newspaper gent, even with a genius for embroidery, could make anything of that? ‘Story? God bless you, sir, I’ve none to tell!’ “Gloomily yours, “ALICE BROWN.” [In pencil] “I thought I should write about five thousand words, but this is how it pans out!” And it pans out extremely well, if a newspaper gent with no genius for embroidery, incapable, indeed, of knitting a single sock for a soldier, may express his satisfaction. For a woman of sixty who has no story of her own to tell has certainly a lot of stories to tell of other people. Miss Brown has told them all. A very respectable list of writings will be found at the close of this chapter. New England stories (_Meadow-Grass_), English travels (_By Oak and Thorn_), poems (_The Road to Castaly_), a study of Stevenson written in collaboration, stories for girls (as _The Secret of the Clan_), a play that, among nearly 1,700 submitted, won a $10,000 prize (_Children of Earth_) and a number of novels of which _The Prisoner_ is the most notable, are a main outline of her contribution to American literature. She is without any question one of the half dozen best short story writers America possesses at this time. Her short stories have achieved a wider fame for her than anything else, and quite rightly. As a poet she does pleasant and sometimes interesting work, but it is impossible to say more. As a dramatist she wrote one play--the play that captured Winthrop Ames’s prize--which was splendidly imaginative and even rather poetic, but as undramatic as a “book play” can be. It never had a chance of popular success. Does some one say that is nothing against it? It is everything against it. The play or the book that does not appeal to a wide audience has a fatal lack and no amount of “literary” merit can make up for that lack.