The large number of Kipling's stories could not have been written outside India, or at least the Orient. They are of the East eastern. "Without Benefit of Clergy," "Muhammad Din," "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows," "The Man Who Would Be King"--the very names conjure up the environment. They do more than that; they almost tell the story. Before he began to write, Kipling knew thoroughly his adopted literary land; in the same way all successful writers must know theirs if they mean to reveal the influence of surroundings on character, if they mean to give, as many writers do, a miniature of the locality in each sketch. To read one of Mary E. Wilkins's stories is to catch the flavor of all New England. Her nun is indeed a New England nun. Nowhere else do people keep house quite so; but in scores of Massachusetts and Connecticut homes the women, married and single, are 'that partic'lar'--or nearly as particular as Louisa Ellis. But wait a minute! [Mary E. Wilkins Freeman] If there are tens of women like Louisa Ellis, wherein comes the story? Why, do you not see?--just in the plus, the superfluity of New Englandishness that there is in Louisa. It is the breadth of that more-so that gave Miss Wilkins her twenty-four stories in the same book, and others outside it. And here is the point: in this kind of story, your writer must know his locality so well that the sameness of the people has a difference in each family and in each member of that family. In other words, his characters must be persons, not figureheads; they may be types, it is true, but they must have the soul of individuality breathed into them. For instance, in this one collection of stories Miss Wilkins has two Louisas, and they both are typically of New England, they both have suitors, and they both are averse to marriage; moreover, each slight course of events is built on the impulse of the woman to avoid matrimony. But here the likeness ends; for the women are individuals, and the lovers are different from each other. The character-drawing of these two stories is a daring attempt on the part of the author, but it is a remarkably successful one. [Hamlin Garland]