[Gutenberg 55964] • The Sapphire Signet

Set in the "very modern" New York City of the early 1900s, where change is constant and construction of the new subway system brings noise and turmoil to what had been a quiet neighborhood, the plot involves three sisters, a younger cousin, and a new friend who together work to solve a mystery rooted in the Revolutionary War. One of the young girls in the story, Corinne Cameron is “offish and queer and quiet. . . and when she isn’t studying she is always reading something." More significantly, when the twins, Jess and Bess, visit Corinne for the first time, she talks about her father with whom she lives (her mother is dead) and she picks up on old book with the title Valentine’s Manual, Volume II, an old history of New York, and said that her father had picked it up an auction sale and given it to her for her birthday. When the twins are nonplussed at the pleasure she is showing in this “old, dilapidated, uninteresting book” she says that she is a born “antiquarian” just like her father.

Another enthralling mystery story by the author whose "Boarded-Up House" was such a sensational St. NICHOLAS success last year. The scene of the new story is laid in the old Greenwich section of New York City; and though its main interest is of to-day the story harks back to Revolutionary times, the background being historically accurate.