Kansas City journal. [volume] (Kansas City, Mo.) 1897-1928, 1898-03-20

village. 1t Is now a mixture of the suburb
and the :shoe town"-both of which are
very foreign to the thing which Miss Will
In her life at all. Most of the faces you
see in the streets of Randolph now are
those of the blessed Irish: they swarm at
the railroad station and give the life about
the stores and the postoffice its character
iStic color.
Miss wilkins heredity is not rural even.
though it is intensely New England.
which Is only another way of saying that
her race is perfectly unmixed English.
Her father came out Of Salem. where his
people had always lived; and Salem. you
New England. He was descended from old
Bray wilkins, witch inqufsitor and promi-
nent Puritan generally of the old time.
died in middle life) had, as nearly as 1 can
make out, nothing of the countryman in
him at all: and the Puritan seemed to sur
vive in him, as it does in thousands OF other
Yankees of the finer type. merely in a sort
Of exaggerated nervousness, conscientious
ness and general unworldliness. He was an
architect Of the old kind, trained In the
building trades rather than in the schools;
and hi varied this, his true occupation.
with a little successful bookkeeping up at
Brattleboro. Miss wilkins mothers people
were of the Holbrooks Of H~olbrook-tine
'.genteel' people of the old sort. The sun
bonneted Jane Field kind of women are
not in her ancestral line at all-unless 1t
be in some of her Observation-Disclosures.
Where and How Miss wilkins Writes.
The ancient kitchen which Is Miss Will
kins' sitting room Is not also her writing
room. Though it is nicely retired, and out
of the noise of the exceedingly quiet house.
hold in which she has her home. its WIN
dow commands a view OF nothing but the
side Of the adjoining house, which affords
but slight inspiration. She writes upstairs,
in q room that looks off eastwardly over
the street and its electric cars to the low
coast hills and the woods in the distance.
Another inccngruity Is to be observed here:
Miss wilkins has a typewriter! Tn ma
chine Is a new arrival, and an experiment.
in some sense forced upon her by the bad
plumbers which compositors are continu-
ally making in her thoroughly picturesque
and intensely individual but sometimes
strangely illeSible handwriting. Nothing
that Miss Wilkins has ever published, the
sensitive literary reader may be assured,
has ever yet been written by her on a type
writer.
Her way of writing is not. usually. to re-
write anything once fully written out, but
to elaborate a good deal as she goes along.
throwing away a great many closely writ.
ten sheets which are her trial lines. And
indeed. though Miss Wilkins says Of her.
self that she does not seem to "compose'
but to write out something which she al
ready knows or else which comes to her
from some source outside or inside of her
she scarcely knows which-She nevertheless
does work out passages or portions OF her
stories with great pains.
She does not go about at all looking for
material for her stories. She never puts
Randolph people into them; though she has.
indeed. put into them dead and gone people.
Barnabus. in Pembroke" with the awful
will. was a man who had lived. Her crea-
tons are mainly drawn purely out of her
imagination. and squared to Nature and
reality by the exercise of a keen and ON
nivorous faculty of observation which has