Thus Corra Harris in the spring of 1914 in New York. It is almost superfluous to say that. No other man or woman of the writers of this country could have uttered the words, because no other American writer has that homely vigor and Biblical phraseology, nor that peculiar directness of uttered thought which can express in one breath the longing for better schools and a closer walk with God, which can contrast the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit in the same sentence. From the day when the first installment of _A Circuit Rider’s Wife_ appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_ it was manifest that America had a new writer of distinction. The distinction is not so much “literary” as national. Corra Harris’s work could be nothing but American. It is racy of the soil, and crusted with unusual and deep personal experience of life. The experience was externally of a rare sort but spiritually of a wide and common and very profound sort. It was an intensive cultivation of the soul that she shared with us and we who had had a taste of that experience were able to understand and rejoice in it. For the depths of life are spiritual depths. They are not gained by travel be it ever so wide, nor by exciting worldly adventures. They are plumbed at home, by the fireside, at the supper table, in bed on sleepless nights, in the snatched intervals of exhausting and ordinary toil, in the room where a father lies dying, in the room where two young people are confessing love, in the room where a child is being born. Corra Harris was born on a typical Southern cotton plantation owned by her father, Tinsley Tucker White, at Farm Hill, Elbert county, Georgia. Her mother had been Mary Elizabeth Matthews. The girl spent her early years on the plantation and was educated at home. Occasionally she made trips to town behind two white mules. When she was 14 she was sent to a local seminary. A few years there joined to the desultory teaching at home gave her what was considered in the South of the late ’70s and early ’80s (she was born March 17, 1869) a very respectable education--for a girl.