The Voice

A woman tells her physician that she mistakenly gave her suitor, Reverend John Fenn, a poison instead of a love potion. The doctor tells the woman to move on. However, Dr. Lavendar, the town’s revered minister, counsels the doctor to prescribe that his patient confess. The woman's father is a strange twist to the story. He's an Irvingite—an English religious movement launched in the 1830s—from a Beaver County village on the Ohio River who's moved up stream with his daughter to Old Chester, where he awaits the Holy Spirit to drive him to speak in tongues and to prophesize.

Margaret Deland (1857-1945) was born Margaretta Wade Campbell to Allegheny City, Allegheny County clothing merchants. Her mother died after childbirth and her father died shortly thereafter, so Deland's mother's sister raised her in Manchester, then a borough in Allegheny County. Deland attended boarding school in New York and studied art at Cooper Union. She married Lorin Fuller Deland, Harvard's football coach. Maggie, as she was called, had a deep interest in women's issues and over the years she opened her home to over 60 unwed mothers and their babies. She was a friend to Willa Cather. For magazines, especially Harper's Weekly and The Atlantic Monthly, she published dozens of short stories, most based on her early years in Maple Grove and Manchester. She died in Boston. Wilhelm Heinrich Detlev Körner (1878-1938), born in Lunden, Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia, was an illustrator.