Very nice, but it tells you nothing that you need to know if you are to frame a hypothesis to account for Miss Cather’s astonishingly rapid progress as a novelist. The material for _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of the Lark_, or a good deal of it, was patently gathered in her impressionable girlhood. The fine chapters of _The Song of the Lark_ which relate Thea Kronberg’s stay in the Cliff Dweller region with Fred Ottenburg are outwardly explained by Miss Cather’s personal interest in these ruins. What is not made in the least clear is the secret of her own success. Let us look into some of the things she has said and see if we can find a clew to it there. “I have never found any intellectual excitement more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these pioneer women at her baking or buttermaking. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than they said--as if I had actually got inside another person’s skin. If one begins that early it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again--no other adventure ever carries one quite so far.” Do you detect something? Do you perceive (1) a set of impressions acquired at the most plastic age and with a sharpness of configuration never to be lost and (2) an extraordinary blend of intellectual and emotional feeling--of heart and mind--which carried the girl _beyond_ the spoken word; and also (3) an imaginative faculty which could go on living a thing after merely hearing about it and living it through to the unnarrated, possibly unexperienced, conclusion? Do you get a hint of any or all of these things? Of course you do! Going further we learn that when Miss Cather began to write she tried to put the Swedish and Bohemian settlers she had known in her girlhood into her short stories. “The results,” we are informed, “never satisfied her.” She discussed this dissatisfaction afterward. “It is always hard to write about the things that are near your heart,” she argued. “From a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort and disguise them. Those stories were so poor that they discouraged me. I decided that I wouldn’t write any more about the country and the people for whom I had a personal feeling. “Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all of my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them and about where my work fell short. She said: ‘Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way; you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story that this or that magazine wants; write the truth and let them take it or leave it.’