The River's Children. An Idyl of the Mississippi: With pictures by Harry C. Edwards.

IN DUST JACKET

STUART, Ruth McEnery. The River's Children. An Idyl of the Mississippi. With pictures by Harry C. Edwards. 12mo, original gilt stamped pictorial green cloth, frontispiece, pp. 179 + 4 plates, fore and bottom edges uncut. New York: Century Co., 1904.

First Edition. Minor foxing of end papers, else a fine copy in pictorial dust jacket which repeats the front cover illustration. There's an arrowhead shaped piece missing at the bottom of the front panel of the pictorial jacket taking five letters of the author's name, and a 1 1/2 x 1 1/2" piece missing from the lower left corner of rear panet takng part of a goodly portion of a blurb for one of the publisher's novels. Also some minor loss to the spine extremities of the jacket, with no loss of printing. Still, the jacket is rare, and it is mostly present. "A sort of pagan worship of the great river Mississippi is the keynote of this somewhat desultory tale of creoles and negroes in Louisiana. The book begins with a great bustle on the levee, the river rising, great gangs of men working to strengthen the embankment, the swinging song of the black toilers as they ply spade and pick. And hard by stand two rich New Orleans merchants of French blood, one of whom confesses in whispers that he once threw in a diamond ring to propitiate the greedy water spirit. The time is not long after the Civil War, and the story presently skips to an account of an ante-bellum planter's house upon an island, an ante-bellum house party, and a great flood, which later swept the place, with the tale of two old negroes who saved and brought up in a shanty the master's daughter. That is the best of the book..."-NY Times, Saturday Review of Books, Januiary 21, 1905. Smith, American Fiction 1901-1925, S1094. McVoy & Campbll, A Bibliography of Fiction by Louisianians and on Louisiana Subjects, p. 67.