The truth about _The Prestons_ is this: Hardly a man or woman will be able to read it and not close the book saying to himself, “Well, the American family is a pretty good sort of an institution, after all!” No finer tribute, we venture to believe, could be paid to a book--to _any_ book. The book was welded together from a series of short stories. Note the word, “welded.” Most novels made up of short stories are a poor patchwork. Here there was an actual fusion. The result is a novel, and nothing else. So important is this book, so pleasant, so inspiringly hopeful in the feeling with which it leaves you, that we may justifiably disregard Mary Heaton Vorse’s other writings for the sake of concentrating on this one narrative. I can only repeat, with a slight rearranging for the sake of emphasis, what I wrote at the time of the book’s publication, which was: Perhaps the nature of the book’s impression on the reader is due to its very inclusiveness. It really doesn’t arrive anywhere except at the end of 427 pages and of one or two years of normal American existences. No great tragedy stains its pages; there is no love story. Nothing comes to a decisive dénouement; we recall not a single “climax” except those little social climaxes which occur in the best regulated families. The only things that happen are Henry’s irritation with his twelve-year-old son, Jimmie; Jimmie’s unconquerable attempts to be allowed to do something that the grown-ups are sure to call getting into mischief; seventeen-year-old Osborn’s adventures of the heart; the changing absorptions of Edith, a high-school girl; the trials of Maria, Mrs. Preston’s unmarried sister who lives with the family, and the philosophical outgivings of Seraphy, for eighteen years the family servant and shield and friend. Not much of anything happens, you may think; well, perhaps not; but you will not be able to leave the Prestons until the last page has been turned. You will laugh unnumbered times as you turn the pages; you will be touched more than once as you read. Quite unreasonably, no doubt, you will fall in love with them as a family, from Aunt Maria to Piker, the dog. They are so much--you. It is quite impossible to do much more with a book like _The Prestons_ than to convey the nature of the story and the character of its telling. It is related by Mrs. Preston and it starts with her exploration of the house on a summer morning. She comes first upon the dog Piker. Piker is lying on a silk wrap of Edith’s. “He is a long dog, modeled after the graceful proportions of a barrel. At every corner nobby legs are put on, dachshund fashion. His sparse yellow bristles are always coming out all over everything.... His tail is long and thick and makes a noise like a policeman’s club when he raps it on the floor.”