In one story, the last, "Tannis of the Flats," the secret of
Elinor Blair's spinsterhood is revealed in an episode which
carries the reader from Avonlea to Saskatchewan and shows the
unselfish devotion of a half-breed Indian girl. The story is
both poignant and dramatic. Its one touch of humor is where
Jerome Carey curses his fate in being compelled to live in that
desolate land in "the picturesque language permissible in the
far Northwest."

Self-sacrifice, as the real basis of happiness, is a favorite
theme in Miss Montgomery's fiction. It is raised to the nth
power in the story entitled, "In Her Selfless Mood," where an
ugly, misshapen girl devotes her life and renounces marriage for
the sake of looking after her weak and selfish half-brother. The
same spirit is found in "Only a Common Fellow," who is haloed
with a certain splendor by renouncing the girl he was to marry in
favor of his old rival, supposed to have been killed in France,
but happily delivered from that tragic fate.

Miss Montgomery loves to introduce a little child or a baby as a
solvent of old feuds or domestic quarrels. In "The Dream Child,"
a foundling boy, drifting in through a storm in a dory, saves a
heart-broken mother from insanity. In "Jane's Baby," a
baby-cousin brings reconciliation between the two sisters,
Rosetta and Carlotta, who had not spoken for twenty years because
"the slack-twisted" Jacob married the younger of the two.

Happiness generally lights up the end of her stories, however
tragic they may set out to be. In "The Son of His Mother," Thyra
is a stern woman, as "immovable as a stone image." She had only