The Little Colonel's Chum, Mary Ware

This volume is the result of an avalanche of letters that, reached the author, Annie Fellows Johnston, complaining that she skipped in the Little Colonel series. To entreaties she has responded with this charming, wholesome volume, in which she fills in the skipped places. Mary Ware is a lovable little girl, not a very little one either, because she is old enough to go to boarding-school, and her ingenuity is evidenced by her sleeping calmly under a raised umbrella because a troublesome roommate adjusted the electric light so it shone on her pillow. Likewise it proves that she is unsuperstitious. The volume as a whole is delightful, and any girl may be proud to number its heroine among her book friends. This is the ninth volume in the "Little Colonel Series".

By : Annie Fellows Johnston (1863 - 1931)

00 - Preface 01 - Mary Enters Warwick 02 - 'The King's Call' 03 - Room-Mates 04 - 'Aye, There's the Rub!' 05 - A Fad and a Christmas Fund 06 - Jack's Watch Fob 07 - In Joyce's Studio 08 - Christmas Day at Eugenia's 09 - The Bride-Cake Shilling Comes to Light 10 - Her Seventeenth Birthday 11 - Trouble for Everybody 12 - The Good-Bye Gate 13 - The Jester's Sword 14 - Back at Lone-Rock 15 - Keeping Tryst

Dear Boys and Girls Who Are Old Friends of the Little Colonel:

When I finished the eighth volume of the Little Colonel Stories, The Maid of Honour, I thought I had reached the end of the series, but such a flood of letters came pouring in demanding to know what happened next, that I could not ignore such a plea, and in consequence The Little Colonel's Knight came riding by.

But even with Lloyd married and "living happily ever after" her friends were not satisfied. "You skipped" they complained by the hundreds. "You never told what happened between the time of her engagement and the wedding, and you never told what happened to Betty and Joyce and Mary and Phil and all the rest of them. Even if you haven't time for another book, couldn't you just please write me a little letter and satisfy my curiosity about each character."

Of course I couldn't begin granting all those requests, and finally I was persuaded it would be easier to answer your questions with a new book. So here is Mary Ware, taking up the thread of the story at the first of the skipped places. The time is September, the same September that Betty went away to Warwick Hall to teach and Lloyd began to prepare for her debut in Louisville.

Now this volume covers only one short year, so of course it can not tell you all you want to know. But if you are disappointed because it does not take you to the final milestone, remember that had we gone that far it would have been the end of all our journeying together. And we have it from our Tusitala himself, that best beloved of travellers, for whom in a far island of the sea was dug "a Road to last for ever," that "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." A.F.J.