delightful home furnished interest
enough to make resort to fiction unnecessary as an entertainment. In
1879 the death of Mr. Wilson ended the idyllic home life and she
returned to her desk, writing "The Speckled Bird" and "Devota," with a
pen that had lost much of its charm in the days of happy absorption.

Having no children of her own, Mrs. Wilson gave her devoted affection
to the children and grandchildren of her husband, who was a widower at
the time of their marriage.

It has been observed that the stories of Augusta Evans have no
location. They happen in any place where the people chance to be and,
given that kind of people, the story would evolve itself in the same
way anywhere else. But for her there was always a place in which
flowers grew and trees waved their branches to the breeze and made
mystic aisles of purpled glooms, shot through with glimpses of sun
amid silences broken happily by the songs of birds. There were always
the wide sky and dim reaches of space and great walls of majestic
mountains against the horizon. However gifted might be her maidens in
roaming amid the stars or delving in philosophic depths, they, like
herself, had always eyes for the beauties which Nature sets in place,
and why should all these things be geographically bounded and
designated by appellations to be recorded in the Postoffice Guide?

Being in Mobile some years ago, I called upon Mrs. Wilson after her
husband had passed on and left her alone in the charming home. She was
in her work-room, if a place so decoratively enchanting can be
connected with a subject so stern and prosaic, so crowded with
every-day commonplaceness, as work. It was a bower of beauty, with
light, graceful furniture, and pots of plants making cheerful greenery
at every available spot. Vases of flowers cut from her garden, tended
by her own care and love, were on desk and table and in sunny alcoves,
filling the room with a glory of color and a fragrance as of incense
from jewelled censers swung in adoration of the goddess of the
exquisite shrine.

Remembering that charming study as I saw it then, blossoming and
redolent with the flowers beloved of the heart of its mistress, I
wonder at times if all that beauty is still there and if some bright
soul, as in the dead days, is sunning itself in that warmth and glow.

The old home has passed into stranger hands, as Mrs. Wilson was
persuaded to sell it after the death of her husband and her removal to
t