Mrs. Harris’s books require reading, not critical discussion. And having read them the criticism ensuing will not be literary criticism but a criticism of life--which literature is sometimes held to be. In the valley she lives with her daughter Faith, now Mrs. Harry Leech. It should be noted that the acknowledged original of Susan Walton in her book, _The Co-Citizens_, was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia’s pioneer suffragist, a woman much honored for her public spirit and for public services rendered as a private person, notably the production at the right moments of a scrapbook in which were pasted all sorts of bits of information about officeholders and candidates. Mrs. Felton collected these items for years. She was over 80 when Mrs. Harris wrote her into _The Co-Citizens_ and although she lived in Cartersville, near “the valley,” the two women did not meet until after the publication of the novel. No better close for this chapter than its opening--Mrs. Harris’s own words! She is picturing her life--and quite as vividly herself--to Isma Dooley. It is after her visit to the European battlefronts. She revives not what she saw of horror and struggle there, but what she has known of pettiness and greatness in her peaceful home: “I was so worried over the feuds between the brethren and the choir and my own fault-finding spirit that I used to go round behind the church sometimes and sit down among the graves to comfort myself. “We have buried our people there for sixty years. Men who never could get on with each other in the church are lying side by side, like brothers in the same bed. I say it encourages me to know that the time will come when we, too, will finish our day’s work and the strife with which we test each other’s spirits, and lie down out there like the lion and the lamb, together. But we shall be dead, which, in my opinion, is the only safe way for lions and lambs to lie down together. “I’d sit there and watch the fallen autumn leaves come whirling and tipping over the tombs like little brown spirits of the dust, blown in the wind. I thought of what a good man old Amos Tell was, though nobody could get on with him in the church. But his contrariness didn’t count now in my thoughts. I only remembered how he bore the burdens of the church; how cross, but generous he was with the poor; how he made the coffin for Molly Brown’s husband and didn’t charge for it. Then I’d bend down and pull a few weeds from among the violets that grew round his monument, as I’d have dusted his coat for him after a long journey. And I would walk over and look at John Elrod’s fine tomb--John, who didn’t know whether he was willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and who surpassed the wise in the simplicity of his faith.