Mary E. Wilkins Freeman ranks among the foremost interpreters of New England village and rural life. Though she may correctly be described as a local colorist, she is much more, for in her short stories and novels she deals perceptively with the 250-year-old Puritan heritage of her region so convincingly, with such objectivity, that she takes an honored place in the development of realism in American literature, a place that the "high priest of realism," William Dean Howells, readily assigned her. Her local color--her presentation of the social and physical aspects of the New England countryside--is unexceptionable; but she either avoids or greatly modifies some of the conventions of local-color writing. Thus she does not dwell on "quaintness," whether of character or folkways, merely for the sake of quaintness. Nor does she record regional dialect with the relentless phonetic accuracy that has rendered much nineteenth-century local-color writing repugnant...