From The Critic Vol. 25 No. 747 (Jun 13, 1896)

To the Editors of The Critic: —

In reading the Rev. Dr. A. K. H. Boyd's “The Last Years of St. Andrews,” I came upon a passage which may interest you, since it contains a very graceful tribute to Miss Mary E. Wilkins. The passage is to be found on pp. 112-113: —

“The dignified apartments at the Waterloo Hotel were not for us this year: but we were pleasantly housed at 15 Athole Crescent. Nothing is more touchingly associated with that house, than two little volumes of exquisitely pathetic short tales of New England life, by Mary E. Wilkins. Her name stands not among the ‘Men and Women of the Time,’ Edition of 1891. But she deserves a niche better than two-thirds of the persons who (some of them) have been permitted to sound their trumpet there: no uncertain sound. The true spark is here, beyond question. Never was real and homely life set out with more beauty and pathos; and with abounding humour, too. Always these things go together. My wife bought the little volumes that day we came to Edinburgh; she read them continually during our fortnight there. And I have come to know them pretty well by heart. I am not going to speak of divers special associations with the departed days. Only that the little volumes, prettily bound in one, abide in an honoured place in my study where I have worked hard for near twenty-three years; and will abide there till I can work no longer. They are published by Mr. Douglas. And more daintily-got-up books will not easily be found.”

Tuley Francis Huntington.

Lake Forest, Ills., 26 May 1896.