Edith Wharton, at 56, does a work of mercy in France; Margaret Deland is similarly engaged at 61. That speaks so much more loudly than their books. And their books are not silent. If the band of a kiltie regiment plays _The Campbells Are Coming_, one of them may be Margaretta Wade (Campbell) Deland. Mrs. Deland was born in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, February 23, 1857. Her parents died while she was very young, and she was reared in the family of an uncle, Benjamin Campbell, who lived in Manchester, then a suburb of Alleghany, and the original Old Chester of Mrs. Deland’s famous and loved stories. “Our home,” Mrs. Deland once wrote, “was a great, old-fashioned country house, built by English people among the hills of western Pennsylvania more than a century ago. There was a stiff, prim garden, with box hedges and closely clipped evergreens. In front of the garden were terraces, and then meadows stretching down to the Ohio River, which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills.” “Which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills!” Beautiful simile! In this old garden the little girl played the greater part of her waking hours. She loved the outdoors. She was highly impressionable and imaginative. She had the curious and dear convictions of childhood. She was sure that the whole of Asia was a yellow land, because the map of Asia in her old dog-eared geography was colored yellow. Her first taste in reading was formed upon _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_ and _Tales of a Grandfather_, Hawthorne’s stories, and the works of Washington Irving. Her first and indeed her final experience of life was that summed up in Stevenson’s saying: “And the greatest adventures are not those we go to seek.” Mrs. Deland expressed it this way: “Not the prominent events; nor the catastrophes, nor the very great pleasures; not the journeys nor the deprivations, but the commonplaces of everyday life determine what a child shall do, and still more positively determine what he shall be.” In one word: character. And it is with character almost solely that Mrs. Deland as a writer has been preoccupied. Dr. Lavendar is a study in character, so is Helena Richie, so is the Iron Woman; and the young people that surround her are character studies of a completeness unexcelled in American fiction. There is more than one way of dealing with character in fiction. But first we must settle what we mean by character. We mean, concisely, inherited traits as affected by environment. Environment includes people as well as things.