_Mrs. Barr’s novels are published by D. Appleton & Company, New York. Some may be had in reprint, others are out of print._
The author of _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was born in 1870 in a big old country house at Shelbyville, Kentucky, the home of her grandfather, Judge Caldwell. Her name was, indeed, Alice Caldwell Hegan as a girl. It was Alice Hegan when she wrote the very small book which is quite as world famous as _Mr. Dooley_, Mrs. Wiggs’s pleasant contemporary. It became Alice Hegan Rice on December 18, 1902, when the daughter of Samuel W. Hegan and Sallie P. Hegan was married to the poet Cale Young Rice. And they have lived happily ever after. They have traveled the world over together. They rest, between whiles, at a big, columned house in Louisville, Kentucky. There are photographs extant showing them in pleasant idleness on the broad verandas. Mr. Rice writes songs inspired by their travels together which make such books as _Wraiths and Realities_ and songs inspired by their mere happy proximity, making a book such as _Poems to A. H. R._, both published in 1918. Mrs. Rice no longer writes the fortunes of Mrs. Wiggs in disused pages of an old business ledger (for that is how the first draft of _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was made). But she writes as agreeably as ever. Mostly shorter pieces. She is not really a novelist but a short story writer. Even _Mrs. Wiggs_ was but a long short story.
Hegans have lived in Louisville pretty close to a century--ninety years anyway. Alice Hegan’s girlhood was sheltered by a brick house on Fourth Street. Summers she spent at Judge Caldwell’s house, her birthplace, with a negro nurse and “Aunt Susan” to tell her folk tales, mostly about personable animals, Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the rest of the common acquaintance of Southern childhood. Dolls, church, Sunday School, day school at “Miss Hampton’s” in a house once the home of George Keats, brother of the poet; dancing school (“in ruffles and in gorgeous, wide, blue sashes, pink being prohibited as highly unbecoming”); dances at Galt House; “parties,” country dances in Shelbyville--these were the tissue of those youthful days.
School days over, Alice Hegan wanted to go to Paris and study art. There was reason to think that she had a talent, which would justify an expenditure of time and money. She abandoned the idea because, as she says, “I was an only daughter. My father and mother needed me. It wouldn’t have been right for me to go.”