A novel which has lately aroused much discussion, the “John Ward, Preacher,” of Margaret Deland, is, although its scene is laid in Pennsylvania, a legitimate growth of New England in its problem and its central character. The orthodox idea of eternal future punishment receives a treatment somewhat similar to that applied by Miss Phelps, in “The Gates Ajar,” to the conventional heaven. The hero seems a revisitant Thomas Shepard, or other stern yet tender Puritan of the past, miraculously set down in a modern environment. The incisiveness of portions of “John Ward,” as well as the grace of its side scenes, gives promise of even more valuable coming contributions to American fiction, by the poet of the charming “Old Garden.” A still more recent New England production is the book of stories by Mary E. Wilkins, “A Humble Romance”; vigorous work, brimful of human nature. We need not now enter into the circumstances, tending to the misdirection of intellectual effort, which so affected the work of Southern women in literature that for some time they produced little of enduring value. These causes have been of late fully set forth by a writer of the New South, Thomas Nelson Page; who, in naming the women of Southern birth or residence most prominent as novelists before the Civil War, places Mrs. Terhune in a class by herself. “Like the others, she has used the Southern life as material, but has exhibited a literary sense of far higher order, and an artistic touch.” Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, a native of West Virginia, has chosen a Pennsylvanian background for some of her best work; producing, perhaps, nothing stronger than “Life in the Iron Mills,” published long since in the _Atlantic_; a story distantly akin to those of Miss Phelps and the author of “Poverty Grass.” The hopeless heart-hunger of the poor has seldom been so passionately pictured. A distinguishing characteristic of the work of Mrs. Davis is her Browning-like insistence on the rare test-moments of life. If, as in the complicated wartime novel “Waiting for the Verdict,”—a work of high intention,—the characters come out startlingly well in the sudden lights flashed upon them, the writer’s idealism is tonic and uplifting.