“Well, girls,” she told her daughters, “we will have a good beefsteak dinner and let to-morrow take care of itself.” Even then she felt, as she afterward said, that “God and Amelia Barr were a multitude.” For fourteen years Mrs. Barr toiled, meeting with successes and rebuffs. It was a hard struggle. After working all day in the Astor Library she would often at night take her daughters to the theater, leaving sometimes in her purse only enough money for carfare in the morning. Returning from one of these outings she discovered that her house had been broken into. Rushing at once to the family Bible, she found $40 between the pages where she had placed it for safety. Not having in those days enough money to bank, she would often put bills behind pictures, and they were never disturbed. In 1884 _Jan Vedder’s Wife_ was published. The success of this book almost immediately placed Mrs. Barr in the front rank of popular American novelists. From that time her record was phenomenal. Over fifty-three when her first book appeared, Mrs. Barr produced an average of over two novels a year and at the close of her life she had not one unsold manuscript. She had written only one article, she said, which she was never able to dispose of. And so little did she care for her books after they had been written that she had not a complete set of them in her library, which numbered several thousand volumes. She not infrequently took up one of her old novels and after reading it said that it seemed like a new story. “All my characters,” she once remarked, “are real to me. They begin to live and have a personality of their own. I have started to write a villain and afterward fallen in love with him and made him my hero.” Mrs. Barr’s books were invariably sold outright. Years ago she made a thorough study of the early history of Manhattan Island, which ultimately formed a foundation on which she built eight historical novels which stand out as among the best of her work. Chronologically considered they should be read as follows: _The House on Cherry Street._ _The Strawberry Handkerchief._ _The Bow of Orange Ribbon._ _A Maid of Old New York._ _A Song of a Single Note._ _The Maid of Maiden Lane._ _Trinity Bells._ _The Belle of Bowling Green._ So much Mr. Corning. The author of this book can add nothing to so extraordinary a story. As fiction, Mrs. Barr’s own life and performance would be called incredible. Her stories are first-rate stories; all of them offer clean, imaginative and very real entertainment; many of them offer a true and valuable picture of vanished or vanishing times, manners and people. Her achievement was much bigger and more solid and worth while than many, many efforts at literary “art.” BOOKS BY AMELIA E. BARR