at times to positive torture.
So it happened, that led by impulse and aided by an escape from

the training given her sisters, instead of "sitting on a cushion
and sewing a fine seam"--the threads of the fabric had to be

counted and just so many allowed to each stitch!--this youngest
child of a numerous household spent her waking hours with the

wild. She followed her father and the boys afield, and when tired
out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking with shy

creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she pleased,
amusing herself with birds, flowers, insects, and plays she

invented. "By the day," writes the author, "I trotted from one
object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of

made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching
fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird

with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the
inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an

ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets."
She had a corner of the garden under a big Bartlett pear tree for

her very own, and each spring she began by planting radishes and
lettuce when the gardening was done; and before these had time to

sprout she set the same beds full of spring flowers, and so
followed out the season. She made special pets of the birds,

locating nest after nest, and immediately projecting herself into
the daily life of the occupants. "No one," she says, "ever taught

me more than that the birds were useful, a gift of God for our
protection from insect pests on fruit and crops; and a gift of

Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected.
From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely

careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over my mouth
when he lifted me for a peep into the nest of the humming-bird,

and did he not walk softly and whisper when he approached the
spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I

knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping
bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened

at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the
feet of the mother bird."

In the nature of this child of the out-of-doors there ran a fibre
of care for wild things. It was instinct with her to go slowly,

to touch lightly, to deal lovingly with every living thing:
flower, moth, bird, or animal. She never gathered great handfuls

of frail wild flowers, carried them an hour and threw them away.
If she picked any, she took only a few, mostly to lay on her

mother's pillow--for she had a habit of drawing comfort from a
cinnamon pink or a trillium laid where its delicate fragrance

reached her with every breath. "I am quite sure," Mrs. Porter
writes, "that I never in my life, in picking flowers, dragged up

the plant by the roots, as I frequently saw other people do. I
was taught from infancy to CUT a bloom I wanted. My regular habit

was to lift one plant of each kind, especially if it were a
species new to me, and set it in my wild-flower garden."

To the birds and flowers the child added moths and butterflies,
because she saw them so frequently, the brilliance of colour in

yard and garden attracting more than could be found elsewhere. So
she grew with the wild, loving, studying, giving all her time. "I

fed butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen
of a cellar window," Mrs. Porter tells us; "doctored all the sick

and wounded birds and animals the men brought me from afield;
made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits they carried in for

my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I grew older,
gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in Fort Wayne. So

I had the first money I ever earned."
Her father and mother had strong artistic tendencies, although

they would have scoffed at the idea themselves, yet the manner in
which they laid off their fields, the home they built, the

growing things they preserved, the way they planted, the life
they led, all go to prove exactly that thing. Their bush--and

vine-covered fences crept around the acres they owned in a strip
of gaudy colour; their orchard lay in a valley, a square of apple

trees in the centre widely bordered by peach, so that it appeared
at bloom time like a great pink-bordered white blanket on the

face of earth. Swale they might have drained, and would not, made
sheets of blue flag, marigold and buttercups. From the home you

could not look in any direction without seeing a picture of
beauty.

"Last spring," the author writes in a recent letter, "I went back
with my mind fully made up to buy that land at any reasonable

price, restore it to the exact condition in which I knew it as a
child, and finish my life there. I found that the house had been

burned, killing all the big trees set by my mother's hands
immediately surrounding it. The hills were shorn and ploughed

down, filling and obliterating the creeks and springs. Most of
the forest had been cut, and stood in corn. My old catalpa in the

fence corner beside the road and the Bartlett pear under which I
had my wild-flower garden were all that was left of the dooryard,

while a few gnarled apple trees remained of the orchard, which
had been reset in another place. The garden had been moved, also

the lanes; the one creek remaining out of three crossed the
meadow at the foot of the orchard. It flowed a sickly current

over a dredged bed between bare, straight banks. The whole place
seemed worse than a dilapidated graveyard to me. All my love and

ten times the money I had at command never could have put back
the face of nature as I knew it on that land."

As a child the author had very few books, only three of her own
outside of school books. "The markets did not afford the miracles

common with the children of today," she adds. "Books are now so
numerous, so cheap, and so bewildering in colour and make-up,

that I sometimes think our children are losing their perspective
and caring for none of them as I loved my few plain little ones

filled with short story and poem, almost no illustration. I had a
treasure house in the school books of my elders, especially the

McGuffey series of Readers from One to Six. For pictures I was
driven to the Bible, dictionary, historical works read by my

father, agricultural papers, and medical books about cattle and
sheep.

"Near the time of my mother's passing we moved from Hopewell to
the city of Wabash in order that she might have constantmedical

attention, and the younger children better opportunities for
schooling. Here we had magazines and more books in which I was

interested. The one volume in which my heart was enwrapt was a
collection of masterpieces of fiction belonging to my eldest

sister. It contained `Paul and Virginia,' `Undine,' `Picciola,'
`The Vicar of Wakefield,' `Pilgrim's Progress,' and several

others I soon learned by heart, and the reading and rereading of
those exquisitely expressed and conceived stories may have done

much in forming high conceptions of what really constitutes
literature and in furthering the lofty ideals instilled by my

parents. One of these stories formed the basis of my first
publicly recognized literary effort."

Reared by people who constantly pointed out every natural beauty,
using it wherever possible to drive home a precept, the child

lived out-of-doors with the wild almost entirely. If she reported
promptly three times a day when the bell rang at meal time, with

enough clothing to constitute a decent covering, nothing more was
asked until the Sabbath. To be taken from such freedom, her feet

shod, her body restricted by as much clothing as ever had been
worn on Sunday, shut up in a schoolroom, and set to droning over

books, most of which she detested, was the worst punishment ever
inflicted upon her she declares. She hated mathematics in any