“The manuscript was read one rainy Saturday morning to a little group of ardent young women which called itself, with a courage half gay and half ironical, the Authors’ Club of Louisville. At that time it boasted no ‘real author,’ but the following was the roster of the club: Evelyn Snead Barnett, Alice Hegan Rice, Ellen Churchill Semple, George Madden Martin, Annie Fellows Johnston, Frances Caldwell Macaulay, Abbie Meguire Roach, Eva A. Madden, Mary Finley Leonard, Venita Seibert White, Margaret van der Cook and Margaret Anderson. This club meant nothing at the time, but it means, now, such stories as _Mrs. Wiggs_ and _Mr. Opp_, _Emmy Lou_, _The Lady of the Decoration_ and the _Little Colonel_ books. It means also such work as Mrs. Roach’s studies of married life--which rendered a year of _Harper’s_ very memorable--and such achievement in anthropo-geography as has made Ellen Semple a name on two continents and a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. To this little club was read this little story--and the club, as a body, became the very figure of laughter, literally holding both its sides. “The story was published by the Century Company in October, 1901, and that next summer, as somebody put it, every tourist had it, ‘sticking up out of his pocket.’” There are thousands of stories to illustrate the world conquest of _Mrs. Wiggs_. West Virginia coal miners whose little homes contain no Bible have the book. In a village of Korea there is, or used to be, an old woman, bent continually over her garden, known to the English officers as “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” In Sidmouth, on the coast of South Devon, England, was another such person. Mr. and Mrs. Rice have had Mrs. Wiggses pointed out to them everywhere--and they have been everywhere--Sicily, China, India, Japan (the poet is a specialist in Orientalism). “In India one Christmas day, after a morning on the Ganges, after hours of Vedic hymns chanted by Brahmin priests and after a terrible vision of the bodies on the burning ghats,” says Margaret Anderson, “Mrs. Rice was suddenly jerked back into modern life by a billboard near Benares. _Mrs. Wiggs_ would be played there that night by an English company!” Mrs. Rice is a good deal interested in philanthropic work at home. The Rices’ house stands in St. James Court, a place of trees, bushes, wide sweeps of lawn and a playing fountain. The author of _Mrs. Wiggs_ devotes time and personal effort to the Cabbage Patch Settlement and to a woman’s club which is a feature of it. For many years Mrs. Rice was chiefly active in work among boys. At sixteen she founded a club for youngsters which held weekly meetings at her own home. When writing she works generally in a snug room or den on the second floor of her home, working through the quiet mornings. She contrives somehow to deal with a heavy correspondence and replies with delightful letters to the letters of all kinds--curious, friendly, grateful--that she is constantly receiving.