The hospital cottage was not new--but very solid. The visitor reflected that amid all this white paneling of the eighteenth century and mission oak of the nineteenth, other visitors would doubtless soon be drinking tea and paying the cost of absorbent cotton and iron bedsteads. Meanwhile he was sufficiently grateful to be allowed to visit another house and find himself seated opposite Miss Waller. She occupied a chintz-covered chair halfway between a flashing grate fire and a row of windows. Mahogany and the implements of authorship were all about. The mahogany was exceptionally fine. Through the windows, marine views and glimpses of moorland--or what they’d call moorland in an English novel. Talk. About the hospital. Nothing about Miss Waller. Nothing about her work. Nothing about her plans. Yes, she lived on Nantucket the year round. Illness in the family kept her closely at home.... Beyond question, there _is_ a Mary E. Waller. She is not mythical. Though she may some day be a cause of controversy. Let it therefore be set down that Shakespeare, not Bacon, wrote _Hamlet_; Mary E. Waller, not Clara Louise Burnham, wrote _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_. And that is all. No more exists. We may say a word or two about Miss Waller’s books since her big success. It will have to be inadequate and sketchy. _A Daughter of the Rich_ is technically described as “for girls of 10 and upward.” _Sanna of the Island Town_ is a series of pen pictures of incidents in the ordinary life of an island village--Nantucket is the original. _Through the Gates of the Netherlands_ is the “pleasant narrative of the six months’ experience in Holland of an American architect and his wife who saw the country, its art and its people intimately and intelligently.” We quote again from the American Library Association’s catalogue. In epitomizing this sort of volume (travel-educational-gift book) see how excellent the outline method is! Edwin Markham liked _Our Benny_, saying: “It is fluent and simple and full of a homely pathos and humor, and it takes a place next below _Snowbound_ and _Myles Standish_.” Caution! _Our Benny_ is a narrative poem; there are those who can’t endure verse. They may pass on to _Flamsted Quarries_. This opens in New York City. A fatherly priest sees a child on the vaudeville stage and takes her to an asylum for homeless children. Later we find them in a small Maine village, a quarry town. There is an embezzler in the story and the theme is the power of a simple environment, good, hard work and honest love to make men and women whole.