Hegans have lived in Louisville pretty close to a century--ninety years anyway. Alice Hegan’s girlhood was sheltered by a brick house on Fourth Street. Summers she spent at Judge Caldwell’s house, her birthplace, with a negro nurse and “Aunt Susan” to tell her folk tales, mostly about personable animals, Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the rest of the common acquaintance of Southern childhood. Dolls, church, Sunday School, day school at “Miss Hampton’s” in a house once the home of George Keats, brother of the poet; dancing school (“in ruffles and in gorgeous, wide, blue sashes, pink being prohibited as highly unbecoming”); dances at Galt House; “parties,” country dances in Shelbyville--these were the tissue of those youthful days. School days over, Alice Hegan wanted to go to Paris and study art. There was reason to think that she had a talent, which would justify an expenditure of time and money. She abandoned the idea because, as she says, “I was an only daughter. My father and mother needed me. It wouldn’t have been right for me to go.” She had, meanwhile, been writing; she had always been writing a little. When she was sixteen the Louisville _Courier-Journal_ had published _The Reveries of a Spinster_, an anonymous companion-piece to _The Reveries of a Bachelor_. The spinster’s reveries brought many letters to the newspaper, letters read with due appreciation by Alice Hegan, author of spinster and reveries both. She had also written a few short stories and had been a contributor to humorous papers. There was nothing surprising or wholly unpremeditated therefore in the writing of _Mrs. Wiggs_. Alice Hegan and her mother kept a “give-away bag” which went regularly to a “poor but merry and philosophic woman” living in a neglected quarter of Louisville, out near the railroad tracks, in the southern part of the city. This woman was the original of Mrs. Wiggs. “The story was not a ‘just-so story,’” says Margaret Steele Anderson in her over-effusive appreciation of Alice Hegan Rice, “nor was it a photograph, exact from head to toe, but, in truth, a development of the original. The merry woman served as a nucleus; the rest was all Alice Hegan.” To quote further: