"It would be hard to find a more entertaining, piquant, and sweet-spirited companion in book-form."—Chicago Record-Herald.
"All that was best in the banished life of the old South has been touched into life and love, into humor and pathos, in this fine and memorable American novel."—Chicago Record-Herald.
"It is an old-fashioned love story."—The Outlook.
"Old Peter Grayson is a charming character, with his old-fashioned virtues, his warm sympathies, and his readiness to lend a hand."—Springfield Republican.
"The story is one of strong dramatic power. Its style is direct and incisive, revealing a series of strongly drawn pictures."—Philadelphia Record.
"It overflows with friendliness and enjoyment of life, and it furnishes a capital example of impressionistic writing."—The Outlook.
"These little stories are as entertaining as any he has written and we can recommend them confidently to his many admirers."—New York Sun.
"They are exceedingly agreeable stories with an atmospheric quality which the versatile author imparts to them."—Philadelphia Press.
"These simple tales contain more of the real art of character-drawing than a score of novels of the day."—New York Evening Post.
"He has set down with humorous compassion and wit the real life that we live every day."—The Independent.
"Mr. Hopkinson Smith's genius for sympathy finds full expression in his stories of human under dogs of one sort and another ... each serves as a centre for an episode, rapid, vivid, story-telling."—The Nation.
"It is in the character-drawing that the author has done his best work. No three finer examples of women can be found than Margaret Grant, Sallie Horn, Oliver's mother, and Lavinia Clendenning, the charming old spinster."—Louisville Courier-Journal.
"A breath of pure and invigorating fragrance out of the fogs and tempests of the day's fiction."—Chicago Tribune.
"None of Mr. Smith's writings have shown more delightfully his spirit of genial kindliness and sympathetic humor."—Boston Herald.
"The dear old colonel claims our smiles and our love as simply and as whole-heartedly as ever."—Life.
"He has always had unquestioning faith in the significance and interest of the simple, universal human experiences as they come to normal, brave, affectionate, gentle-mannered, or robust, untrained men and women.
"As he looks at nature so he looks at man: with clear vision, with sympathy rather than curiosity; with an eye for the fine things in the rugged man and the vigorous, sinewy, self-sustaining woman, and for the natural virtues, the deep tenderness, the true-heartedness in the man of long descent and the woman of gentle breeding.
"His style is singularly concise, exact, compact; possessed of a vitality which uses various arts of expression; his style is notable for concentration, solidity, reality."—Hamilton W. Mabie.