BY

   NEW YORK

   PUBLISHERS

   First Printing, September 9, 1922

   Second Printing, October 19, 1922

   Third Printing, November 22, 1922

   Fourth Printing, December 5, 1922

   Printed in the United States of America

    These parodies do good to the book parodied; great good, sometimes; they are kindly meant, and the parodist has usually keenly enjoyed the book of which he sits down to make a fool.

     R. L. STEVENSON.

   “

    If Winter Comes

   ” placed its author not only as a Best Seller, but as one of the Great Novelists of to-day. Not always are those royalties crowned by those laurels. Tarzan (of, if I remember rightly, the Apes) never won the double event. And I am told by superior people that, intellectually, Miss Ethel M. Dell takes the hindmost. Personally, I found “If Winter Comes” a most sympathetic and interesting book. I think there are only two points on which I should be disposed to quarrel with it. Firstly, though Nona is a real creation, Effie is an incredible piece of novelist’s machinery. Secondly, I detest the utilization of the Great War at the present day for the purposes of fiction. It is altogether too easy. It buys the emotional situation ready-made. It asks the reader’s memory to supplement the writer’s imagination. And this is not my sole objection to its use.

   I wonder if I might, without being thought blasphemous, say a word or two about the Great Novelists of to-day. They have certain points of resemblance. I do not think that over-states it.

   They have the same little ways. They divide their chapters into sections, and number the sections in plain figures. This is 

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