a Middle Western university. Meantime she had been publishing in
magazines a number of short stories dealing with various types of New
England country people, and in 1916 these were gathered into a volume
with the title _Hillsboro People_. This book met with a wide acceptance,
not only in this country but in France, where, like her other books, it
was quickly translated and published. "Flint and Fire" is taken from
this book. _The Real Motive_, another book of short stories, and
_Understood Betsy_, a book for younger readers, were her next
publications.

Meantime the Great War had come, and its summons was heard in their
quiet mountain home. Mr. Fisher went to France with the Ambulance Corps;
his wife as a war-relief worker. A letter from a friend thus described
her work:

She has gone on doing a prodigious amount of work. First running,
almost entirely alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle,
editing a magazine for them, running the presses, often with her
own hands, getting books written for them; all the time looking out
for refugees and personal cases that came under her attention:
caring for children from the evacuated portions of France,
organizing work for them, and establishing a Red Cross hospital for
them.

Out of the fullness of these experiences she wrote her next book, _Home
Fires in France_, which at once took rank as one of the most notable
pieces of literature inspired by the war. It is in the form of short
stories, but only the form is fiction: it is a perfectly truthful
portrayal of the French women and of some Americans who, far back of the
trenches, kept up the life of a nation when all its people were gone. It
reveals the soul of the French people. _The Day of Glory_, her latest
book, is a series of further impressions of the war in France.

It is not often that an author takes us into his workshop and lets us
see just how his stories are written. The preceding account of Dorothy
Canfield's literary methods was written especially for this book.

DUSKY AMERICANS

_Most stories of Negro life fall into one of two groups. There is the
story of the Civil War period, which pictures the "darky" on the old
plantation, devoted to "young Massa" or "old Miss,"--the Negro of
slavery. Then there are stories of recent times in which the Negro is
used purely for comic effect, a sort of minstrel-show character. Neither
of these is the Negro of to-day.