To write such a narrative, you must have vividly and accurately in mind your selected environment. It is to form the color of your picture. If you do not think you know thus intimately any locality, open your eyes. The beautiful fact about living is, that we all always live somewhere, and that same somewhere is full of a number of things, and of nothing more surely than of local color. It is your business as a writer to add this color constantly to your stories; but the best way to proceed is not to attempt to spread it on from the outside, but to let it shine through from within. To be sure, it must be on the valleys and hills, the streets and the houses and the window curtains; but it must also be in the speech of your peoples, in their notions, their attitude toward each other and toward the great and little questions of human relationship. Besides knowing the environment, you must know indisputably some individuals of the place. You can not draw a life-like sketch from an abstraction. The canvas painters have taught us that truth, and so have the sculptors. For every figure they have a living model. They must know where the bones and sinews are, even if they mean to etherealize. So must you, and you have a harder problem; your figure must speak. One false tone, and you mar the impression. Mary E. Wilkins, excellent artist that she is, has impaired one of her strongest stories, "The Revolt of Mother," by a lapse of art in respect to two of her characters. The girl and boy are not old enough for the age the author intimates; or what she says that they are is too old for what they prove that they are when they speak and when they keep silent even,--especially the girl. Moreover, we feel that the mother is ten or fifteen years younger, than the age given her. These are minor points, one admits, and, as we say, the story is excellent; but in so far as it fails in little ways it is not superfine, though one of the most lovable and dramatic, of Miss Wilkins's productions. In art you must not make this mistake; it is no answer to assert that in life the woman was sixty and the boy and girl fourteen and twenty. On the basis of the character-drawing the woman is forty-five or fifty and the children are twins, less than sixteen years old. In other words, a realist that is an artist as well selects not only what is true but also what will immediately without argument seem true. Miss Wilkins usually is convincing.