“She may choose a commonplace subject--a girl, a woman, a road, a husband.... Mrs. Coburn immediately succeeds in placing hers in the uncommon category. It is the qualifying adjective that plays a prominent part in making her subjects peculiarly original. She specifies that her heroine is a sick-a-bed lady, her girl is very tired, her thoroughfare is a runaway road, and even the husband in her sanitarium story is a Sunday spouse. “It is not her nomenclature alone that is unique and attractive. Added to marked creative ability, she has a quality of verbal fitness, and her phrases are charged with amazing intensity and force, so that there is an exhilaration in her pages. Indeed, as one of her friends said, after reading _The Kink in the Air_, one about decides that it is the ‘kink’ in this author’s style that is its chiefest charm.” Many scoff; Franklin P. Adams used to divert himself with Eleanor Hallowell Abbottisms; scratching the surface of the ground like an industrious hen you may uncover many choice morsels of wriggling English. But if you think these are all the Eleanor Hallowell Abbott books contain you are as deluded as the hen that thinks she has uncovered earth’s deepest secrets. Below, far below, but not buried at such a depth as to be uncoverable by ordinary minds, are veins of pure humor, tenderness; the rich gold of sympathy and friendly fancifulness. They are paying streaks. Pick up a reprinted copy of _Molly Make-Believe_ and look at the page in the front which records _over twenty_ editions in five years! We follow the lead of the Boston _Globe_ article: Miss Abbott works slowly and carefully. Her chief concern while writing is with her own feeling about the tale she is at work upon. Unless she comes to like it pretty well she does not send it to a publisher. It must interest her first as some sort of warranty that it will interest others. “Painter, musician, writer--whether anybody else likes your work or not,” she says, “doesn’t specially matter if you can only bring that work to the point where you like it yourself.”