Edwin Markham liked _Our Benny_, saying: “It is fluent and simple and full of a homely pathos and humor, and it takes a place next below _Snowbound_ and _Myles Standish_.” Caution! _Our Benny_ is a narrative poem; there are those who can’t endure verse. They may pass on to _Flamsted Quarries_. This opens in New York City. A fatherly priest sees a child on the vaudeville stage and takes her to an asylum for homeless children. Later we find them in a small Maine village, a quarry town. There is an embezzler in the story and the theme is the power of a simple environment, good, hard work and honest love to make men and women whole.
_My Ragpicker_ is about Nanette, an appealing little child of poverty in Paris. _A Cry in the Wilderness_ has American and Canadian characters and its scenes are laid mainly in New York and in a seigneury on the St. Lawrence--Miss Waller’s first invasion of Canada. _Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart_ was published by Miss Waller herself, in 1913; doubtless it was an enterprise in behalf of that hospital which she thrust between herself and her visitor. _From an Island Outpost_ is a meditative book--thoughts that came to Miss Waller as she wrote from her own island outpost on Nantucket. _Out of the Silences_ is a return to Canada and a novel of the Great War. The setting is just over the border from Dakota. The central character, Bob Collamore, an American boy, is left as a youngster of nine in charge of William Plunket, a saddle-maker, quaintly philosophical, broad-minded, sympathetic, with a considerable knowledge of the human heart. The boy Bob grows up with Plunket’s stepson, McGillie, and the children of the Cree Indian tribe. He gets a good deal of the red man’s knowledge. As he matures the white man’s ambition to get out in the world and match his wits against his fellows seizes him. He goes forth confidently, to find that his youthful years have fixed indelibly his ideals, his philosophy and his outlook on life. Love, romance and success come to him--and death. For the war calls to his manhood and takes him to France.
An intermediate book may be briefly mentioned. _A Year Out of Life_ is only partly a work of fiction; in part it records Miss Waller’s impressions of German life--long before the war, of course, for it was published in 1909.