before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her

lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the
metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two

novels were the fruits of this youthfulardour. Through the
sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three

months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, I
studied harder after leaving school than ever before and in a

manner that did me real good. The most that can be said of what
education I have is that it is the very best kind in the world

for me; the only possible kind that would not ruin a person of my
inclinations. The others of my family had been to college; I

always have been too thankful for words that circumstances
intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove

in company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and
mentality. What small measure of success I have had has come

through preserving my individual point of view, method of
expression, and following in after life the Spartan regulations

of my girlhood home. Whatever I have been able to do, has been
done through the line of education my father saw fit to give me,

and through his and my mother's methods of rearing me.
"My mother went out too soon to know, and my father never saw one

of the books; but he knew I was boiling and bubbling like a yeast
jar in July over some literary work, and if I timidly slipped to

him with a composition, or a faulty poem, he saw good in it, and
made suggestions for its betterment. When I wanted to express

something in colour, he went to an artist, sketched a design for
an easel, personally superintended the carpenter who built it,

and provided tuition. On that same easel I painted the water
colours for `Moths of the Limberlost,' and one of the most

poignant regrets of my life is that he was not there to see them,
and to know that the easel which he built through his faith in me

was finally used in illustrating a book.
"If I thought it was music through which I could express myself,

he paid for lessons and detected hiddenability that should be
developed. Through the days of struggle he stood fast; firm in

his belief in me. He was half the battle. It was he who demanded
a physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigours

of scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten
books in ten years, five of which were on nature subjects, having

my own illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with
natural history, true to nature. It was he who demanded of me

from birth the finishing of any task I attempted and who taught
me to cultivatepatience to watch and wait, even years, if

necessary, to find and secure material I wanted. It was he who
daily lived before me the life of exactly such a man as I

portrayed in `The Harvester,' and who constantly used every atom
of brain and body power to help and to encourage all men to do

the same."
Marriage, a home of her own, and a daughter for a time filled the

author's hands, but never her whole heart and brain. The book
fever lay dormant a while, and then it became a compelling

influence. It dominated the life she lived, the cabin she
designed for their home, and the books she read. When her

daughter was old enough to go to school, Mrs. Porter's time came.
Speaking of this period, she says: "I could not afford a maid,

but I was very strong, vital to the marrow, and I knew how to
manage life to make it meet my needs, thanks to even the small

amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin of fourteen rooms,
and kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter's clothes, I

kept a conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six
hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and

linnets, and cooked and washed dishes besides three times a day.
In my spare time (mark the word, there was time to spare else the

books never would have been written and the pictures made) I
mastered photography to such a degree that the manufacturers of

one of our finest brands of print paper once sent the manager of
their factory to me to learn how I handled it. He frankly said

that they could obtain no such results with it as I did. He
wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia, and have me

tell him exactly how I worked. As I was using the family bathroom
for a darkroom and washing negatives and prints on turkey

platters in the kitchen, I was rather put to it when it came to
giving an exhibition. It was scarcely my fault if men could not

handle the paper they manufactured so that it produced the
results that I obtained, so I said I thought the difference might

lie in the chemical properties of the water, and sent this man on
his way satisfied. Possibly it did. But I have a shrewd suspicion

it lay in high-grade plates, a careful exposure, judicious
development, with self-compounded chemicals straight from the

factory, and C.P. I think plates swabbed with wet cotton before
development, intensified if of short exposure, and thoroughly

swabbed again before drying, had much to do with it; and paper
handled in the same painstaking manner had more. I have hundreds

of negatives in my closet made twelve years ago, in perfect
condition for printing from to-day, and I never have lost a plate

through fog from imperfect development and hasty washing; so my
little mother's rule of `whatsoever thy hands find to do, do it

with thy might,' held good in photography."
Thus had Mrs. Porter made time to study and to write, and editors

began to accept what she sent them with little if any changes.
She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to

Recreation, and with the first installment was asked to take
charge of the department and furnish material each month for

which she was to be paid at current prices in high-grade
photographic material. We can form some idea of the work she did

under this arrangement from the fact that she had over one
thousand dollars' worth of equipment at the end of the first

year. The second year she increased this by five hundred, and
then accepted a place on the natural history staff of Outing,

working closely with Mr. Casper Whitney. After a year of this
helpful experience Mrs. Porter began to turn her attention to

what she calls "nature studies sugar coated with fiction." Mixing
some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-upfiction, she

wrote a little story entitled "Laddie, the Princess, and the
Pie."

"I was abnormally sensitive," says the author, "about trying to
accomplish any given thing and failing. I had been taught in my

home that it was black disgrace to undertake anything and fail.
My husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines,

and it was not possible to conduct departments in any of them and
not have it known; but only a few people in our locality read

these publications, none of them were interested in nature
photography, or natural science, so what I was trying to do was

not realized even by my own family.
"With them I was much more timid than with the neighbours. Least

of all did I want to fail before my man Person and my daughter
and our respective families; so I worked in secret, sent in my

material, and kept as quiet about it as possible. On Outing I had
graduated from the camera department to an illustrated article

each month, and as this kept up the year round, and few
illustrations could be made in winter, it meant that I must

secure enough photographs of wild life in summer to last during
the part of the year when few were to be had.

"Every fair day I spent afield, and my little black horse and
load of cameras, ropes, and ladders became a familiar sight to

the country folk of the Limberlost, in Rainbow Bottom, the
Canoper, on the banks of the Wabash, in woods and thickets and