Mrs. Tarbro-Smith had arranged the picnic herself, hoping to bring a little
pleasure into the dullness of the summer, enliven the interest in the little
church, and make a pleasant day for the people of Clarence, and she had
succeeded in this as in everything she had undertaken during her summer in Iowa.
As the leader of her own little circle of bright people in New York, she was
accustomed to doing things successfully, and perhaps she was too sure of always
having things her own way. As sister of the world-famous author, Marriott Nolan
Tarbro, she was always received with consideration in New York, even by editors,
but in seeking out a dead eddy in middle Iowa she had been in search of the two
things that the woman author most desires, and best handles: local color and
types. The editor of MURRAY'S MAGAZINE had told her that his native ground--
middle Iowa--offered fresh material for her pen, and, intent on opening this new
mine of local color, she had stolen away without letting even her most intimate
friends know where she was going. To have her coming heralded would have put her
"types" on their guard, and for that reason she had assumed as an impenetrable
incognito one-half her name. No rays of reflected fame glittered on plain Mrs.
Smith.

While her literary side had found some pleasure in studying the people she had
fallen among, she was not able to recognize the distinctness of type in them
that the editor of MURRAY'S had led her to believe she should find. She had
hoped to discover in Clarence a type as sharply defined as the New England
Yankee or the York County Dutch of Pennsylvania, but she could not see that the
middle Iowan was anything but the average country person such as is found
anywhere in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, a type that is hard to portray with
fidelity, except with rather more skill than she felt she had, since it is
composed of innumerable ingredients drawn not only from New England, but from
nearly every State, and from all the nations of Europe. However, her kindness of
heart had been able to exert itself bountifully, and she had had enough
experience in her sundry searches for local color to know that a lapse of time