of
the pioneer has been celebrated in song and story; but not surer, more
needed, or more faithful was it than the wife who accompanied him in his
explorations and shared his perils and toils. The women of Kentucky in
those days, and all who helped the men to push further and further back
the boundaries of savagery and extend those of civilization, deserve to
be held in lasting remembrance by all who honor American womanhood, even
though their qualities were not of those most admired in their sex. They
had their place in our national story as well as their softer-reared
sisters of the Atlantic coast, and they did their work as well and
nobly.

Before returning to the social centre from our excursus into the wilds,
it is proper to pause for an instant in the temple of letters and note a
tablet on the walls. It is an old saying that "there is nothing new
under the sun"; and it may surprise some readers to learn that the
feminine preponderance in the fiction of the present, and even the
growing tendency to laud precocity in authorship, are not without
warrant in the earlier history of our nation's literature. Long ago
Hannah Hill, the author of that cheerful tract called _A Legacy for
Children: Last Expressions and Dying Words_, wrote and published a book
when at the immature age of eleven; and even the present day cannot as
yet surpass that piece of absurdity. More significant, however, is the
fact that the first American novel was the work of a woman. Susanna
Haswell was not of American birth, but she came to this country as a
mere child and may fairly be claimed as a product of our soil, at least
as far as her literary genius is concerned. In 1786 she published a work
called _Victoria_, and, two years later, _The Inquisitor_. She then went
to England with her lately married spouse, William Rowson, for a three
years' residence; and it was during her absence from the country that
she published the most famous of her works, _Charlotte Temple, a Tale of
Truth_. It is this latter work that, with our national cheerful
disregard for facts, is generally termed the "First American Novel," the
existence of its predecessors and the fact of its foreign birth being
entirely disregarded. However, the book was in its day a great success,
having what was then an enormous sale--twenty-five hundred copies within
a few years. While the style is of the most theatrical kind, the
characters posing alternately in the front of the stage as the