“I recall one day when we were swapping a Longfellow check-stub for a Whittier post-card, or something of that sort. We got caught at it and were kept ignominiously after school, to the infinite delight of our more frivolous-minded companions.” Miss Abbott’s husband, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, is the “silent partner” in her work to whom _Molly Make-Believe_ is dedicated. He aids and abets her in her stories, in taking a course in playwriting at Harvard under Professor George Baker, in anything she wants to do. Dr. Coburn is medical adviser of the Lowell high school and an all-round athlete and sportsman whenever a city practice will release him sufficiently. He and Mrs. Coburn spend their spare time salmon fishing in Maine, playing tennis at Lowell, coon and wild turkey hunting on the edge of the Florida everglades--doing anything, in fact, that two persons, husband and wife, great comrades and possessing similar tastes, can always find to do happily together. BOOKS BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT _Molly Make-Believe_, 1910. _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_, 1911. _The White-Linen Nurse_, 1913. _The Indiscreet Letter_, 1915. _Little Eve Edgarton_, 1915. _The Stingy Receiver_, 1917. _Published by the Century Company, New York_. _The Ne’er-Do-Much_, 1918. _Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York_. _Old-Dad_, 1919. _Published by E. P. Dutton & Company. New York_. CHAPTER XXX HARRIET T. COMSTOCK The significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in reprint. After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits “the road.” The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known until _Joyce of the North Woods_ went into reprint. The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”--is 10,000 copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the best novels. _Joyce_ went into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted, did _Janet of the Dunes_ and _A Son of the Hills_. In a little more than three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since then _The Place Beyond the Winds_ and later books have been put out by the reprinters. Is there any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We think not.