Miss Maria Thompson Daviess, author of The Melting of Molly, was born at Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in October, 1872, the descendant of the famous Joseph Hamilton Daviess, the granddaughter of the historian of Harrodsburg, whose full name she bears, and the niece of Mrs. H. D. Pittman and Miss Annie Thompson Daviess, the Kentucky novelists. Miss Daviess was graduated from Science Hill Academy, Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1891, after which she studied English for a year at Wellesley College. She then went to Paris to study art at Julien's, and several of her pictures have been hung in the Salon. As a miniature painter she excelled. At the conclusion of her art course, Miss Daviess returned to America, making her home at Nashville, Tennessee, where she resides at the present time. She taught at Belmont College, Nashville, for a year or more, and set up as a painter of miniatures for a public that demanded values in their portraits that she could not see fit to grant, so she finally decided to write. Miss Daviess's first book, and the one that she is still best known by, was Miss Selina Lue and the Soap-Box Babies (Indianapolis, 1909). Miss Lue, spinster, tucks babies into a row of soap-boxes, maintaining sort of a free day-nursery, and the reader has much delicious humor from her duties. Miss Selina Lue was followed by The Road to Providence (Indianapolis, 1910), dominated by the character of Mother Mayberry, guide, philosopher, and friend to a Tennessee town; Rose of Old Harpeth (Indianapolis, 1911), was a love story "as ingenuous and sweet as a boy's first kiss under a ruffled sunbonnet." Selina Lue and Mother Mayberry were both past their bloom; Rose possessed the power and glory of youth. The Treasure Babies (Indianapolis, 1911), was a delightful children's story, which has been dramatized and produced, but Miss Daviess's most charming novel, The Melting of Molly (Indianapolis, 1912), was "the saucy success of the season," for eight months the best selling book in America. Molly must melt from the plumpest of widows to the slenderest of maidens in just three months because the sweetheart of her girlhood days, now a distinguished diplomat, homeward bound, demands a glimpse of her in the same blue muslin dress which she wore at their parting years ago. The melting process, with the O. Henry twist at the end, is the author's business to narrate, and she does it in the most fetching manner. The little novel is "gay, irresistible, all sweetness and spice and everything nice." Miss Daviess's latest story, Sue Jane (New York, 1912), has for its heroine a little country girl who comes to Woodlawn Seminary (which is none other than the author's alma mater, Science Hill), is at first laughed at and later loved by the girls of that school. She is as quaint and charming a child as one may hope to meet in the field of juvenile fiction. The Elected Mother (Indianapolis, 1912), the best of the three short-stories tucked in the back of the Popular edition of Miss Selina Lue (New York, 1911), was a rather unique argument for woman's equal rights. It proves that motherhood and mayoralties may go hand and hand—in at least one modern instance. Harpeth Roses (Indianapolis, 1912), were wise saws culled from the pages of her first four books, made into an attractive little volume. Just as the year of 1912 came to a close Miss Daviess's publishers announced that her new novel, Andrew the Glad, a love story, would appear in January, 1913. Phyllis, another juvenile, will also be issued in 1913, but will first be serialized in The Visitor, a children's weekly, of Nashville. That Miss Daviess has been an indefatigable worker may be gathered at a glance. She has the "best seller touch," which is the most gratifying thing a living writer may possess. The present public demands that its reading shall be as light as a cream puff and sparking as a brook, and, in order to qualify for The Bookman's monthly handicap, a writer must possess those two requisites: deftness of touch and brightness. These Miss Daviess has. And so, when the summer-days are over-long and the winter's day is dull, Maria Thompson Daviess and her brood of books will be found certain dispellers of earthly woes and bringers of good cheer.

Bibliography. The Bookman (December, 1909); The Bookman (July, 1912).

MRS. MOLLY MORALIZES[70]

[From The Melting of Molly (Indianapolis, 1912)]

Why don't people realize that a seventeen-year-old girl's heart is a sensitive wind-flower that may be shattered by a breath? Mine shattered when Alfred went away to find something he could do to make a living, and Aunt Adeline gave the hard green stem to Mr. Carter when she married me to him. Poor Mr. Carter!

No, I wasn't twenty, and this town was full of women who were aunts and cousins and law-kin to me, and nobody did anything for me. They all said with a sigh of relief, "It will be such a nice safe thing for you, Molly." And they really didn't mean anything by tying up a gay, dancing, frolicking, prancing colt of a girl with a terribly ponderous bridle. But God didn't want to see me always trotting along slow and tired and not caring what happened to me, even pounds and pounds of plumpness, so he found use for Mr. Carter in some other place but this world, and I feel that He is going to see me through whatever happens. If some of the women in my missionary society knew how friendly I feel with God, they would put me out for contempt of court.

No, the town didn't mean anything by chastening my spirit with Mr. Carter, and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man. Of that I feel sure. Hillsboro is like that. It settled itself here in a Tennessee valley a few hundreds of years ago and has been hatching and clucking over its own small affairs ever since. All the houses set back from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation. Lots of times young, long-legged, frying-size boys scramble out of the nests and go off to college and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by the world. Alfred was one of them.

And, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and marries a plump little broiler and takes her away with him, but mostly they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate. That's what I did.

I was a poor, little, lost chick with frivolous tendencies and they all clucked me over into this empty Carter nest which they considered well-feathered for me. It gave them all a sensation when they found out from the will just how well it was feathered. And it gave me one, too. All that money would make me nervous if Mr. Carter hadn't made Doctor John its guardian, though I sometimes feel that the responsibility of me makes him treat me as if he were my step-grandfather-in-law. But all in all, though stiff in its knees with aristocracy, Hillsboro is lovely and loving; and couldn't inquisitiveness be called just real affection with a kind of squint in its eye?

And there I sat on my front steps, being embraced in a perfume of everybody's lilacs and peachblow and sweet syringa and affectionate interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two photographs and many letters I had kept locked up in the garret for years. Is it any wonder I tingled when he told me that he had never come back because he couldn't have me and that now the minute he landed in America he was going to lay his heart at my feet? I added his honors to his prostrate heart myself and my own beat at the prospect. All the eight years faded away and I was again back in the old garden down at Aunt Adeline's cottage saying good-by, folded up in his arms. That's the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word "folded" made me remember that blue muslin dress again. I had promised to keep it and wear it for him when he came back—and I couldn't forget that the blue belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is—no, I won't write it. I had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes after I had read the letter and measured it.

No, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to Doctor John with such a real trouble as that! All of a sudden I hugged the letter and the little book up close to my breast and laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.

Then before I went into the house I assembled my garden and had family prayers with my flowers. I do that because they are all the family I've got, and God knows that all His budding things need encouragement, whether it is a widow or a snowball-bush. He'll give it to us!

And I'm praying again as I sit here and watch for the doctor's light to go out. I hate to go to sleep and leave it burning, for he sits up so late and he is so gaunt and thin and tired-looking most time. That's what the last prayer is about, almost always,—sleep for him and no night call!