The Story of Waitstill Baxter (Illustrated)

The Story of Waitstill Baxter: her name was Patience so singularly inappropriate that everyone called her Patty. She was a fiery loving little soul with redgold hair and a taste for this world's vanities--a taste indeed seldom gratified! For Patty and her half sister Waitstill--who by the way is really the heroine--are daughters of Deacon Baxter than whom no meaner man or less indulgent parent ever lived.

Having successively lost three wives, "whose pleasure in joining the angels was mild compared with their relief at parting with the Deacon," Deacon Baxter finds it desirable and economical to burden fourteen year old Waitstill with all the household cares including mothering little Patience. Waitstill and Patience grow up in an atmosphere of constant work, fault-finding, suspicion and stinginess. The Deacon apparently hasn't a single redeeming virtue. The plot concerns itself with the love affairs of the two girls--Patty's rapid clandestine and beginning with a kiss which is no way for a properly conducted love affair to begin. Waitstill's the slow growth of years of quiet devotion and with the embrace at the end where it should be. Trustworthy Cephas above referred to never enjoyed the regrets he longed for--Patty's smiles were for another. Some of the best pages record the philosophical dissertations of Uncle Bart, father of Cephas, who gives him good advice on woman and her ways, yet leaves that transparent youth happy in the belief that his particular partiality for Patty has passed unnoticed. Another good bit is the episode of Annabel Franklin--well dressed city girl of doll-like charms whose appearance at church is a call to arms for Patty. Of course Mrs. Riggs tells her story well with delicacy and charm. (Publisher's Weekly, July-December, 1913)

Kate Douglas Wiggin (September 28, 1856 August 24, 1923) was an American educator and author of children's stories, most notably the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878 (the Silver Street Free Kindergarten). With her sister during the 1880s, she also established a training school for kindergarten teachers. Kate Wiggin devoted her adult life to the welfare of children in an era when children were commonly thought of as cheap labor.

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