heroism during the plague, and made it memorable in a story that touches the heart and fills the eyes.  ‘A Kentucky Cardinal,’ with ‘Aftermath,’ its second part, is full of history and of historic personages.  ‘Summer in Arcady:  A Tale of Nature,’ the latest of Mr. Allen’s stories, is no less based on local history and no less full of local color than his other tales, notwithstanding its general unlikeness.

This book sounds a deeper note than the earlier tales, although the truth which Mr. Allen sees is not mere fidelity to local types, but the essential truth of human nature.  His realism has always a poetic aspect.  Quiet, reserved, out of the common, his books deal with moods rather than with actions; their problems are spiritual rather than physical; their thought tends toward the higher and more difficult way of life.

A COURTSHIP
From ‘Summer in Arcady’

The sunlight grew pale the following morning; a shadow crept rapidly over the blue; bolts darted about the skies like maddened redbirds; the thunder, ploughing its way down the dome as along zigzag cracks in the stony street, filled the caverns of the horizon with reverberations that shook the earth; and the rain was whirled across the landscape in long, white, wavering sheets.  Then all day quiet and silence throughout Nature except for the drops, tapping high and low the twinkling leaves; except for the new melody of woodland and meadow brooks, late silvery and with a voice only for their pebbles and moss and mint, but now yellow and brawling and leaping-back into the grassy channels that were their old-time beds; except for the indoor music of dripping eaves and rushing gutters and overflowing rain-barrels.  And when at last in the gold of the cool west the sun broke from the edge of the gray, over what a green, soaked, fragrant world he reared the arch of Nature’s peace!

[Illustration:  A COURTSHIP.  Photogravure from Painting by H. Vogka.]

Not a little blade of corn in the fields but holds in an emerald vase its treasures of white gems.  The hemp-stalks bend so low under the weight of their plumes, that were a vesper sparrow to alight on one for his evening hymn, it would go with him to the ground.  The leaning barley and rye and wheat flash in the last rays their jeweled beards.  Under the old apple-trees, golden-brown mushrooms are already pushing upward through the leaf-loam, rank with many an autumn’s dropping.  About the yards the peonies fall with faces earthward.  In the stable-lots the larded porkers, with bristles as clean as frost, and flesh of pinky whiteness, are hunting with nervous nostrils for the lush purslain.  The fowls are driving their bills up and down their wet breasts.  And the farmers who have been shelling corn for the mill come out of their barns, with their coats over their shoulders, on the way to supper, look about for the plough-horses, and glance at the western sky, from which the last drops are falling.