, as "A. L. B." all his
later books were dedicated. Soon after his marriage he moved to Nutley,
New Jersey. Here he was not only the editor and man of letters but the
neighbor who could always be called on in time of need, and the citizen
who took an active part in the community life, helping to organize the
Village Improvement Society, one of the first of its kind.

He followed up his first volume by two short novels, _The Midge_ and
_The Story of a New York House_. Then he undertook the writing of the
short story, his first book being _Zadoc Pine and other Stories_. The
title story of this book contains a very humorous and faithful
delineation of a New Englander who is transplanted to a New Jersey
suburb. Soon after writing this he began to read the short stories of
Guy de Maupassant. He admired them so much that he half translated, half
adapted a number of them, and published them under the title _Made in
France_. Then he tried writing stories of his own, in the manner of de
Maupassant, and produced in _Short Sixes_ a group of stories which are
models of concise narrative, crisply told, artistic in form, and often
with a touch of surprise at the end. Other volumes of short stories are
_More Short Sixes_, and _Love in Old Cloathes_. _Jersey Street and
Jersey Lane_ was a book which grew out of his Nutley life. He also wrote
a play, _The Tower of Babel_, which was produced by Marie Wainwright in
1883. He died at Nutley, May 11, 1896. He was one of the first American
authors to develop the short story as we know it to-day, and few of his
successors have surpassed him in the light, sure style and the firmness
of construction which are characteristic of his later work.

SOCIETY IN OUR TOWN

_Life in a small town, which means any place of less than a hundred
thousand people, is more interesting than life in a big city. Both
places have their notables, but in the small town you know these people,
in the city you only read about them in the papers._ IN OUR TOWN _is a
series of portraits of the people of a typical small city of the Middle
West, seen through the keen eyes of a newspaper editor. This story tells
how the question of the social leadership of the town was finally
settled._

THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP

BY

WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
had known in a vague way