The Sioux County Journal

Pierre Loti is about to start on a journey through India.

"Elizabeth Hastings," the author of that clever satire, "An Experiment In Altruism," turns out to be Miss Margaret Sherwood, a young instructor in Wellesley College.

Col. John Hay is the latest author to boast a literary daughter. Miss Helen Hay contributes to one of the young folks' magazines a humorous poem called "The Merry Mongoose."

The danger that besets the novelist who attempts to write plays is illustrated by Mr. Zangwill in an anecdote of an actress who played in an unsuccessful comedy by a distinguished man of letters. One of her stage directions, she said, ran thus: "Re-enter Mary, having drunk a cup of tea."

George Hugo has been made sub-director of La Nouvelle Revue, of which Mme. Adam is in charge. It is supposed that he and young Leon Daudet will soon replace Mme. Adam, who is to devote all her time to her six volumes of memoirs, one of which is to appear each year until finished.

The prize of $2,000 which Miss Mary Wilkins recently won in the detective-story competition is not her first success of the kind. Her earliest published story, "The Ghost Family," secured her the prize of $50 for which it was written. Miss Wilkins' bad chirography handicapped her early efforts to gain a publisher's favor. She writes an immature, schoolgirl hand that used to prejudice publishers' "readers" against her.

This is the pessimistic conclusion at which Mr. Howells has arrived, as set forth in his latest book: "I have found that literature gives one no certain station in the world of men's activities, neither idle or useful. We literary folk try to believe that it does, but that is all nonsense. At every period of life among boys and men we are accepted when they are at leisure and want to be amused; and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted."

One of the most promising of the younger school of authors in the West is Miss Lillian Bell, of Chicago, of whose newest book, "A Little Sister to the Wilderness," five thousand copies were sold in three weeks. Miss Bell is a young woman of thirty, who became known a few years ago by her "Love Affairs of An Old Maid." She had written two complete novels before she was fifteen, but they are not destined ever to see the light of publication.