Although among his earliest attempts at fiction they give fascinating glimpses of a time when motor cars were novelties, schoolmasters wore mortar boards and gowns, and America was a rising power in the world. The best of them display the author’s love of games and knack for neat plotting. In one, a resourceful teenaged heroine helps a truant schoolboy cricketer by marooning his credulous schoolmaster at the top of a church tower until the match is over.