At the Foot of the Rainbow E-book

                              1907
                   AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW

                     by Gene Stratton Porter









Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)



            A Little Story of Her Life and Work


  FOR several years Doubleday, Page & Company have been receiving
repeated requests for information about the life and books of Gene
Stratton-Porter. Her fascinating nature work with bird, flower, and
moth, and the natural wonders of the Limberlost Swamp, made famous
as the scene of her nature romances, all have stirred much
curiosity among readers everywhere.

  Mrs. Porter did not possess what has been called "an aptitude for
personal publicity." Indeed, up to the present, she has discouraged
quite successfully any attempt to stress the personal note. It is
practically impossible, however, to do the kind of work she has
done- to make genuine contributions to natural science by her
wonderful field work among birds, insects, and flowers, and then,
through her romances, to bring several hundred thousands of people
to love and understand nature in a way they never did before- 
without arousing a legitimate interest in her own history, her
ideals, her methods of work, and all that underlies the structure
of her unusual achievement.

  Her publishers have felt the pressure of this growing interest and
it was at their request that she furnished the data for a biographical
sketch that was to be written of her. But when this actually came
to hand, the present compiler found that the author had told a story
so much more interesting than anything he could write of her, that
it became merely a question of how little need be added.

  The following pages are therefore adapted from what might be styled
the personal record of Gene Stratton-Porter. This will account for
the very intimate picture of family life in the Middle West for
some years following the Civil War.

  Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his
wife, at the time of their marriage, as a "ninety-pound bit of pink
porcelain, pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big
rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing
the loveliest name ever given a woman- Mary." he further added that
"God fashioned her heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother
of children, and as her especial gift of Grace, he put Flower Magic
into her fingers." Mary Stratton was the mother of twelve lusty
babies, all of whom she reared past eight years of age, losing two
a little over that, through an attack of scarlet fever with
whooping cough; too ugly a combination for even such a wonderful
mother as she. With this brood on her hands she found time to keep
an immaculate house, to set a table renowned in her part of the
state, to entertain with unfailing hospitality all who came to her
door, to beautify her home with such means as she could command, to
embroider and fashion clothing by hand for her children; but her
great gift was conceded by all to be the making of things to grow.
At that she was wonderful. She started dainty little vines and
climbing plants from tiny seeds she found in rice and coffee.
Rooted things she soaked in water, rolled in fine sand, planted
according to habit, and they almost never failed to justify her
expectations. She even grew trees and shrubs from slips and
cuttings no one else would have thought of trying to cultivate, her
last resort being to cut a slip diagonally, insert the lower end in
a small potato, and plant as if rooted. And it nearly always grew!

  There is a shaft of white stone standing at her head in a cemetery
that belonged to her on a corner of her husband's land; but to Mrs.
Porter's mind her mother's real monument is a cedar of Lebanon
which she set in the manner described above. The cedar tops the
brow of a little hill crossing the grounds. She carried two slips
from Ohio, where they were given to her by a man who had brought
the trees as tiny things from the holy Land. She planted both in
this way, one in her dooryard and one in her cemetery. The tree
on the hill stands thirty feet tall now, topping all others, and
has a trunk two feet in circumference.

  Mrs. Porter's mother was of Dutch extraction, and like all Dutch
women she worked her special magic with bulbs, which she favoured
above other flowers. Tulips, daffodils, star flowers, lilies,
dahlias, little bright hyacinths, that she called "blue bells," she
dearly loved. From these she distilled exquisite perfume by putting
clusters, & time of perfect bloom, in bowls lined with freshly
made, unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting the few
drops of extract thus obtained with alcohol. "She could do more
different things," says the author, "and finish them all in a
greater degree of perfection than any other woman I have ever
known. If I were limited to one adjective in describing her,
`capable' would be the word."

  The author's father was descended from a long line of ancestors of
British blood. he was named for, and traced his origin to, that
first Mark Stratton who lived in New York, married the famous
beauty, Anne Hutchinson, and settled on Stratton Island, afterward
corrupted to Staten, according to family tradition. From that point
back for generations across the sea he followed his line to the
family of Strattons of which the Earl of Northbrooke is the present
head. To his British traditions and the customs of his family, Mark
Stratton clung with rigid tenacity, never swerving from his course
a particle under the influence of environment or association. All
his ideas were clear-cut; no man could influence him against his
better judgment. He believed in God, in courtesy, in honour, and
cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he
would rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he
could be proud, than on the throne of England, which was the
strongest way he knew to express himself. His very first earnings
he spent for a book; when other men rested, he read; all his life
he was a student of extraordinarily tenacious memory. He especially
loved history: Rollands, Wilson's Outlines, Hume, Macauley,
Gibbon, Prescott, and Bancroft, he could quote from all of them
paragraphs at a time contrasting the views of different writers on
a given event, and remembering dates with unfailing accuracy. "He
could repeat the entire Bible," says Mrs. Stratton-Porter, "giving
chapters and verses, save the books of Generations; these he said
`were a waste of gray matter to learn.' I never knew him to fail in
telling where any verse quoted to him was to be found in the Bible."
And she adds: "I was almost afraid to make these statements, although
there are many living who can corroborate them, until John Muir
published the story of his boyhood days, and in it I found the
history of such rearing as was my father's, told of as the customary
thing among the children of Muir's time; and I have referred many
inquirers as to whether this feat were possible, to the Muir book."

  All his life, with no thought of fatigue or of inconvenience to
himself, Mark Stratton travelled miles uncounted to share what he
had learned with those less fortunately situated, by delivering
sermons, lectures, talks on civic improvement and politics. To him
the love of God could be shown so genuinely in no other way as in
the love of his fellowmen. He worshipped beauty: beautiful faces,
souls, hearts, beautiful landscapes, trees, animals, flowers. He
loved colour: rich, bright colour, and every variation down to the
faintest shadings. He was especially fond of red, and the author
carefully keeps a cardinal silk handkerchief that he was carrying
when stricken with apoplexy at the age of seventy-eight. "It was so
like him," she comments, "to have that scrap of vivid colour in his
pocket. He never was too busy to fertilize a flower bed or to dig
holes for the setting of a tree or bush. A word constantly on his
lips was `tidy.' It applied equally to a woman, a house, a field,
or a barn lot. He had a streak of genius in his make-up: the
genius of large appreciation. Over inspired Biblical passages, over
great books, over sunlit landscapes, over a white violet abloom in
deep shade, over a heroic deed of man, I have seen his brow light
up, his eyes shine."

  Mrs. Porter tells us that her father was constantly reading aloud
to his children and to visitors descriptions of the great deeds of
men. Two "hair-raisers" she especially remembers with increased
heart-beats to this day were the story of John Maynard, who piloted
a burning boat to safety while he slowly roasted at the wheel. She
says the old thrill comes back when she recalls the inflection of
her father's voice as he would cry in imitation of the captain:
"John Maynard!" and then give the reply. "Aye, aye, sir!" His other
until it sank to a mere gasp: favourite was the story of Clemanthe,
and her lover's immortal answer to her question: "Shall we meet again?"

  To this mother at forty-six, and this father at fifty, each at
intellectual top-notch, every faculty having been stirred for years
by the dire stress of Civil War, and the period immediately
following, the author was born. From childhood she recalls
"thinking things which she felt should be saved," and frequently
tugging at her mother's skirts and begging her to "set down" what
the child considered stories and poems. Most of these were some big
fact in nature that thrilled her, usually expressed in Biblical
terms; for the Bible was read twice a day before the family and
helpers, and an average of three services were attended on Sunday.

  Mrs. Porter says that her first all-alone effort was printed in
wabbly letters on the fly-leaf of an old grammar. It was entitled:
"Ode to the Moon." "Not," she comments, "that I had an idea what an
`ode' was, other than that I had heard it discussed in the
family together with different forms of poetic expression. The
spelling must have been by proxy: but I did know the words I used,
what they meant, and the idea I was trying to convey.

"No other farm was ever quite so lovely as the one on which I was
born after this father and mother had spent twenty-five years
beautifying it," says the author. It was called "hopewell" after
the home of some of her father's British ancestors. The natural
location was perfect, the land rolling and hilly, with several
flowing springs and little streams crossing it in three directions,
while plenty of forest still remained. The days of pioneer
struggles were past. The roads were smooth and level as floors, the
house and barn commodious; the family rode abroad in a double
carriage trimmed in patent leather, drawn by a matched team of gray
horses, and sometimes the father "speeded a little" for the delight
of the children. "We had comfortable clothing," says Mrs. Porter,
"and were getting our joy from life without that pinch of anxiety
which must have existed in the beginning, although I know that
father and mother always held steady, and took a large measure of
joy from life in passing."

Her mother's health, which always had been perfect, broke about the
time of the author's first remembrance due to typhoid fever
contracted after nursing three of her children through it. She
lived for several years, but with continual suffering, amounting 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 constant medical
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 form and spent
all her time on natural science, language, and literature. "Friday
afternoon," writes Mrs. Porter, "was always taken up with an
exercise called `rhetoricals,' a misnomer as a rule, but let that
pass. Each week pupils of one of the four years furnished
entertainment for the assembled high school and faculty. Our
subjects were always assigned, and we cordially disliked them. This
particular day I was to have a paper on `Mathematical Law.'

"I put off the work until my paper had been called for several
times, and so came to Thursday night with excuses and not a line.
I was told to bring my work the next morning without fail. I went
home in hot anger. Why in all this beautiful world, would they not
allow me to do something I could do, and let any one of four
members of my class who revelled in mathematics do my subject? That
evening I was distracted. `I can't do a paper on mathematics, and
I won't!' I said stoutly; `but I'll do such a paper on a subject I
can write about as will open their foolish eyes and make them see
how wrong they are.'"

Before me on the table lay the book I loved, the most wonderful
story in which was `Picciola' by Saintine. Instantly I began to
write. Breathlessly I wrote for hours. I exceeded our limit ten
times over. The poor Italian Count, the victim of political
offences, shut by Napoleon from the wonderful grounds, mansion, and
life that were his, restricted to the bare prison walls of
Fenestrella, deprived of books and writing material, his one
interest in life became a sprout of green, sprung, no doubt, from
a seed dropped by a passing bird, between the stone flagging of the
prison yard before his window. With him I had watched over it
through all the years since I first had access to the book; with
him I had prayed for it. I had broken into a cold sweat of fear
when the jailer first menaced it; I had hated the wind that bent it
roughly, and implored the sun. I had sung a paean of joy at its
budding, and worshipped in awe before its thirty perfect blossoms.
The Count had named it `Picciola'- the little one- to me also it was
a personal possession. That night we lived the life of our `little
one' over again, the Count and I, and never were our anxieties and
our joys more poignant.

"Next morning," says Mrs. Porter, "I dared my crowd to see how long
they could remain on the grounds, and yet reach the assembly room
before the last toll of the bell. This scheme worked. Coming in so
late the principal opened exercises without remembering my paper.
Again, at noon, I was as late as I dared be, and I escaped until
near the close of the exercises, through which I sat in cold fear.
When my name was reached at last the principal looked at me
inquiringly and then announced my inspiring mathematical subject.
I arose, walked to the front, and made my best bow. Then I said:
`I waited until yesterday because I knew absolutely nothing about my
subject'- the audience laughed- `and I could find nothing either
here or in the library at home, so last night I reviewed Saintine's
masterpiece, "Picciola."'

"Then instantly I began to read. I was almost paralyzed at my
audacity, and with each word I expected to hear a terse little
interruption. Imagine my amazement when I heard at the end of the
first page: `Wait a minute!' Of course I waited, and the principal
left the room. A moment later she reappeared accompanied by the
superintendent of the city schools. `Begin again,' she said.
`Take your time.'

"I was too amazed to speak. Then thought came in a rush. My paper
was good. It was as good as I had believed it. It was better than
I had known. I did go on! We took that assembly room and the corps
of teachers into our confidence, the Count and I, and told them all
that was in our hearts about a little flower that sprang between
the paving stones of a prison yard. The Count and I were free
spirits. From the book I had learned that. He got into political
trouble through it, and I had got into mathematical trouble, and we
told our troubles. One instant the room was in laughter, the next
the boys bowed their heads, and the girls who had forgotten their
handkerchiefs cried in their aprons. For almost sixteen big
foolscap pages I held them, and I was eager to go on and tell them
more about it when I reached the last line. Never again was a
subject forced upon me."

After this incident of her schooldays, what had been inclination
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 youthful ardour. 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 hidden ability 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
cultivate patience 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-up fiction, 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 beside the
roads; but few people understood what I was trying to do, none of
them what it would mean were I to succeed. Being so afraid of
failure and the inevitable ridicule in a community where I was
already severly criticised on account of my ideas of housekeeping,
dress, and social customs, I purposely kept everything I did as
quiet as possible. It had to be known that I was interested in
everything afield, and making pictures; also that I was writing
field sketches for nature publications, but little was thought
of it, save as one more, peculiarity, in me. So when my little
story was finished I went to our store and looked over the
magazines. I chose one to which we did not subscribe, having an
attractive cover, good type, and paper, and on the back of an old
envelope, behind the counter, I scribbled: Perriton Maxwell, 116
Nassau Street, New York, and sent my story on its way.

"Then I took a bold step, the first in my self-emancipation. Money
was beginning to come in, and I had some in my purse of my very own
that I had earned when no one even knew I was working. I argued that
if I kept my family so comfortable that they missed nothing from
their usual routine, it was my right to do what I could toward
furthering my personal ambitions in what time I could save from my
housework. And until I could earn enough to hire capable people to
take my place, I held rigidly to that rule. I who waded morass,
fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in air, and
crossed water on improvised rafts without a tremor, slipped with
many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a box for myself, so
that if I met with failure my husband and the men in the bank need
not know what I had attempted. That was early May; all summer I
waited. I had heard that it required a long time for an editor to
read and to pass on matter sent him; but my waiting did seem out of
all reason. I was too busy keeping my cabin and doing field work to
repine; but I decided in my own mind that Mr. Maxwell was a `mean
old thing' to throw away my story and keep the return postage.
Besides, I was deeply chagrined, for I had thought quite well of my
effort myself, and this seemed to prove that I did not know even
the first principles of what would be considered an interesting story.

"Then one day in September I went into our store on an errand and
the manager said to me: `I read your story in the ~Metropolitan
last night. It was great! Did you ever write any fiction before?'

"My head whirled, but I had learned to keep my own counsels, so I
said as lightly as I could, while my heart beat until I feared he
could hear it: `No. Just a simple little thing! Have you any spare
copies? My sister might want one.'

"He supplied me, so I hurried home, and shutting myself in the
library, I sat down to look my first attempt at fiction in the
face. I quite agreed with the manager that it was `great.' Then I
wrote Mr. Maxwell a note telling him that I had seen my story in
his magazine, and saying that I was glad he liked it enough to use
it. I had not known a letter could reach New York and bring a reply
so quickly as his answer came. It was a letter that warmed the deep
of my heart. Mr. Maxwell wrote that he liked my story very much, but
the office boy had lost or destroyed my address with the wrappings,
so after waiting a reasonable length of time to hear from me, he
had illustrated it the best he could, and printed it. He wrote that
so many people had spoken to him of a new, fresh note in it, that
he wished me to consider doing him another in a similar vein for a
Christmas leader and he enclosed my very first check for fiction.

"So I wrote: `How Laddie and the Princess Spelled Down at the
Christmas Bee.' Mr. Maxwell was pleased to accept that also, with
what I considered high praise, and to ask me to furnish the
illustrations. He specified that he wanted a frontispiece, head and
tail pieces, and six or seven other illustrations. Counting out the
time for his letter to reach me, and the material to return, I was
left with just ~one day in which to secure the pictures. They had
to be of people costumed in the time of the early seventies and I
was short of print paper and chemicals. First, I telephoned to Fort
Wayne for the material I wanted to be sent without fail on the
afternoon train. Then I drove to the homes of the people I wished
to use for subjects and made appointments for sittings, and
ransacked the cabin for costumes. The letter came on the eight A.M.
train. At ten o'clock I was photographing Colonel Lupton beside
my dining-room fireplace for the father in the story. At eleven I
was dressing and posing Miss Lizzie Huart for the princess. At
twelve I was picturing in one of my bed rooms a child who served
finely for Little Sister, and an hour later the same child in a
cemetery three miles in the country where I used mounted
butterflies from my cases, and potted plants carried from my
conservatory, for a graveyard scene. The time was early November,
but God granted sunshine that day, and short focus blurred the
background. At four o'clock I was at the schoolhouse, and in the
best-lighted room with five or six models, I was working on the
spelling bee scenes. By six I was in the darkroom developing and
drying these plates, every one of which was good enough to use. I
did my best work with printing-out paper, but I was compelled to
use a developing paper in this extremity, because it could be
worked with much more speed, dried a little between blotters, and
mounted. At three o'clock in the morning I was typing the
quotations for the pictures, at four the parcel stood in the hall
for the six o'clock train, and I realized that I wanted a drink,
food, and sleep, for I had not stopped a second for anything from
the time of reading Mr. Maxwell's letter until his order was ready
to mail. For the following ten years I was equally prompt in doing
all work I undertook, whether pictures or manuscript, without a
thought of consideration for self; and I disappointed the confident
expectations of my nearest and dearest by remaining sane, normal, and
almost without exception the healthiest woman they knew." 

This story and its pictures were much praised, and in the following
year the author was asked for several stories, and even used bird
pictures and natural history sketches, quite an innovation for a
magazine at that time. With this encouragement she wrote and
illustrated a short story of about ten thousand words, and sent it
to the Century. Richard Watson Gilder advised Mrs. Porter to
enlarge it to book size, which she did. This book is "The
Cardinal." Following Mr. Gilder's advice, she recast the tale and,
stating with the mangled body of a cardinal some marksman had left
in the road she was travelling, in a fervour of love for the birds
and indignation at the hunter, she told the Cardinal's life
history in these pages.

The story was promptly accepted and the book was published with
very beautiful half-tones, and cardinal buckram cover.
Incidentally, neither the author's husband nor daughter had the
slightest idea she was attempting to write a book until work had
progressed to that stage where she could not make a legal contract
without her husband's signature. During the ten years of its life
this book has gone through eight different editions, varying in
form and make-up from the birds in exquisite colour, as colour work
advanced and became feasible, to a binding of beautiful red
morocco, a number of editions of differing design intervening. One
was tried in gray binding, the colour of the female cardinal, with
the red male used as an inset. Another was woodsgreen with the red
male, and another red with a wild rose design stamped in. There is a
British edition published by Hodder and Stoughton. All of these had
the author's own illustrations which authorities agree are the
most complete studies of the home life and relations of a pair of
birds ever published.

The story of these illustrations in "The Cardinal" and how the
author got them will be a revelation to most readers. Mrs. Porter
set out to make this the most complete set of bird illustrations
ever secured, in an effort to awaken people to the wonder and
beauty and value of the birds. She had worked around half a dozen
nests for two years and had carried a lemon tree from her
conservatory to the location of one nest, buried the tub, and
introduced the branches among those the birds used in approaching
their home that she might secure proper illustrations for the
opening chapter, which was placed in the South. When the complete
bird series was finished, the difficult work over, and there
remained only a few characteristic Wabash River studies of flowers,
vines, and bushes for chapter tail pieces to be secured, the author
"met her Jonah," and her escape was little short of a miracle.

After a particularly strenuous spring afield, one teeming day in
early August she spent the morning in the river bottom beside the
Wabash. A heavy rain followed by August sun soon had her dripping
while she made several studies of wild morning glories, but she was
particularly careful to wrap up and drive slowly going home, so
that she would not chill. In the afternoon the author went to the
river northeast of town to secure mallow pictures for another
chapter, and after working in burning sun on the river bank until
exhausted, she several times waded the river to examine bushes on
the opposite bank. On the way home she had a severe chill, and for
the following three weeks lay twisted in the convulsions of
congestion, insensible most of the time. Skilled doctors and nurses
did their best, which they admitted would have availed nothing if the
patient had not had a constitution without a flaw upon which to work.

"This is the history," said Mrs. Porter, "of one little tail piece
among the pictures. There were about thirty others, none so
strenuous, but none easy, each having a living, fighting history
for me. If I were to give in detail the story of the two years'
work required to secure the set of bird studies illustrating `The
Cardinal,' it would make a much larger book than the life of the bird."

"The Cardinal" was published in June of 1903. On the 20th of
October, 1904, "Freckles" appeared. Mrs. Porter had been delving
afield with all her heart and strength for several years, and in
the course of her work had spent every other day for three months
in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of studies of the nest of
a black vulture. Early in her married life she had met a Scotch
lumberman, who told her of the swamp and of securing fine timber
there for Canadian shipbuilders, and later when she had moved to
within less than a mile of its northern boundary, she met a man who
was buying curly maple, black walnut, golden oak, wild cherry, and
other wood extremely valuable for a big furniture factory in Grand
Rapids. There was one particular woman, of all those the author
worked among, who exercised herself most concerning her. She never
failed to come out if she saw her driving down the lane to the
woods, and caution her to be careful. If she felt that Mrs. Porter
had become interested and forgotten that it was long past meal
time, she would send out food and water or buttermilk to refresh
her. She had her family posted, and if any of them saw a bird with
a straw or a hair in its beak, they followed until they found its
location. It was her husband who drove the stake and ploughed
around the killdeer nest in the cornfield to save it for the
author; and he did many other acts of kindness without
understanding exactly what he was doing or why. "Merely that I
wanted certain things was enough for those people," writes Mrs.
Porter. "Without question they helped me in every way their big
hearts could suggest to them, because they loved to be kind, and to
be generous was natural with them. The woman was busy keeping house
and mothering a big brood, and every living creature that came her
way, besides. She took me in, and I put her soul, body, red head,
and all, into Sarah Duncan. The lumber and furniture man I combined
in McLean. Freckles was a composite of certain ideals and my own
field experiences, merged with those of Mr. Bob Burdette Black,
who, at the expense of much time and careful work, had done more
for me than any other ten men afield. The Angel was an idealized
picture of my daughter.

"I dedicated the book to my husband, Mr. Charles Darwin Porter, for
several reasons, the chiefest being that he deserved it. When word
was brought me by lumbermen of the nest of the Black Vulture in the
Limberlost, I hastened to tell my husband the wonderful story of
the big black bird, the downy white baby, the pale blue egg, and to
beg back a rashly made promise not to work in the Limberlost. Being
a natural history enthusiast himself, he agreed that I must go; but
he qualified the assent with the proviso that no one less careful
of me than he, might accompany me there. His business had forced
him to allow me to work alone, with hired guides or the help of
oilmen and farmers elsewhere; but a Limberlost trip at that time
was not to be joked about. It had not been shorn, branded, and
tamed. There were most excellent reasons why I should not go there.
Much of it was impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out;
oilmen were just invading it. In its physical aspect it was a
treacherous swamp and quagmire filled with every plant, animal, and
human danger known in the worst of such locations in the Central States.

"A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired
to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we
reached the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces
and the horse stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter
in kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The time was late June; we
forced our way between steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of
gnats, flies, mosquitoes, poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch
for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle deep at every step, and logs we
thought solid broke under us. Our progress was a steady succession
of prying and pulling each other to the surface. Our clothing was
wringing wet, and the exposed parts of our bodies lumpy with bites
and stings. My husband found the tree, cleared the opening to the
great prostrate log, traversed its unspeakable odours for nearly
forty feet to its farthest recess, and brought the baby and egg to
the light in his leaf-lined hat.

"We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant
and binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for
almost three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was
able to take wing. Of course we soon made a road to the tree, grew
accustomed to the disagreeable features of the swamp and
contemptuously familiar with its dangers, so that I worked anywhere
in it I chose with other assistance; but no trip was so hard and
disagreeable as the first. Mr. Porter insisted upon finishing the
Little Chicken series, so that `deserve' is a poor word for any
honour that might accrue to him for his part in the book."

This was the nucleus of the book, but the story itself originated
from the fact that one day, while leaving the swamp, a big feather
with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and swirling
earthward and fell in the author's path. Instantly she looked
upward to locate the bird, which from the size and formation of the
quill could have been nothing but an eagle; her eyes, well trained
and fairly keen though they were, could not see the bird, which
must have been soaring above range. Familiar with the life of the
vulture family, the author changed the bird from which the feather
fell to that described in "Freckles." Mrs. Porter had the old swamp
at that time practically untouched, and all its traditions to work
upon and stores of natural history material. This falling feather
began the book which in a few days she had definitely planned and
in six months completely written. Her title for it was "The Falling
Feather," that tangible thing which came drifting down from Nowhere,
just as the boy came, and she has always regretted the change to
"Freckles." John Murray publishes a British edition of this book
which is even better liked in Ireland and Scotland than in England.

As "The Cardinal" was published originally not by Doubleday, Page
& Company, but by another firm, the author had talked over with the
latter house the scheme of "Freckles" and it had been agreed to
publish the story as soon as Mrs. Porter was ready. How the book
finally came to Doubleday, Page & Company she recounts as follows:

"By the time `Freckles' was finished, I had exercised my woman's
prerogative and `changed my mind'; so I sent the manuscript to
Doubleday, Page & Company, who accepted it. They liked it well
enough to take a special interest in it and to bring it out with
greater expense than it was at all customary to put upon a novel at
that time; and this in face of the fact that they had repeatedly
warned me that the nature work in it would kill fully half its
chances with the public. Mr. F. N. Doubleday, stating on a trip to
the Bahamas, remarked that he would like to take a manuscript with
him to read, and the office force decided to put `Freckles' into
his grip. The story of the plucky young chap won his way to the
heart of the publishers, under a silk cotton tree, 'neath bright
southern skies, and made such a friend of him that through the
years of its book-life it has been the object of Special attention.
Mr. George Doran gave me a photograph which Mr. horace MacFarland made
of Mr. Doubleday during this reading of the Mss. of `Freckles'
which is especially interesting."

That more than 2,000,000 readers have found pleasure and profit in
Mrs. Porter's books is a cause for particular gratification. These
stories all have, as a fundamental reason of their existence, the
author's great love of nature. To have imparted this love to
others- to have inspired many hundreds of thousands to look for the
first time with seeing eyes at the pageant of the out-of-doors- is
a satisfaction that must endure. For the part of the publishers,
they began their business by issuing "Nature Books" at a time when
the sale of such works was problematical. As their tastes and
inclinations were along the same lines which Mrs. Porter loved to follow,
it gave them great pleasure to be associated with her books which opened
the eyes of so great a public to new and worthy fields of enjoyment.

The history of "Freckles" is unique. The publishers had inserted
marginal drawings on many pages, but these, instead of attracting
attention to the nature charm of the book, seemed to have exactly
a contrary effect. The public wanted a novel. The illustrations
made it appear to be a nature book, and it required three long slow
years for "Freckles" to pass from hand to hand and prove that there
really was a novel between the covers, but that it was a story that
took its own time and wound slowly toward its end, stopping its
leisurely course for bird, flower, lichen face, blue sky, perfumed
wind, and the closest intimacies of the daily life of common folk.
Ten years have wrought a great change in the sentiment against
nature work and the interest in it. Thousands who then looked upon
the world with unobserving eyes are now straining every nerve to
accumulate enough to be able to end life where they may have bird,
flower, and tree for daily companions.

Mrs. Porter's account of the advice she received at this time is
particularly interesting. Three editors who read "Freckles" before
it was published offered to produce it, but all of them expressed
precisely the same opinion: "The book will never sell well as it
is. If you want to live from the proceeds of your work, if you want
to sell even moderately, you must ~cut out the nature stuff." "Now
to put in the nature stuff," continues the author, "was the express
purpose for which the book had been written. I had had one year's
experience with `The Song of the Cardinal,' frankly a nature book,
and from the start I realized that I never could reach the
audience I wanted with a book on nature alone. To spend time
writing a book based wholly upon human passion and its outworking
I would not. So I compromised on a book into which I put all the
nature work that came naturally within its scope, and seasoned it
with little bits of imagination and straight copy from the lives of
men and women I had known intimately, folk who lived in a simple,
common way with which I was familiar. So I said to my publishers:
`I will write the books exactly as they take shape in my mind. You
publish them. I know they will sell enough that you will not lose.
If I do not make over six hundred dollars on a book I shall never
utter a complaint. Make up my work as I think it should be and
leave it to the people as to what kind of book they will take into
their hearts and homes.' I altered `Freckles' slightly, but from
that time on we worked on this agreement.

"My years of nature work have not been without considerable insight
into human nature, as well," continues Mrs. Porter. "I know its
failings, its inborn tendencies, its weaknesses, its failures, its
depth of crime; and the people who feel called upon to spend their
time analyzing, digging into, and uncovering these sources of
depravity have that privilege, more's the pity! If I had my way
about it, this is a privilege no one could have in books intended
for indiscriminate circulation. I stand squarely for book
censorship, and I firmly believe that with a few more years of
such books, as half a dozen I could mention, public opinion will
demand this very thing. My life has been fortunate in one glad
way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the woods.
For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met, lived
with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of
thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and
cherish high ideals, and it is ~upon the lives of these that _I_
base what _I_ write. To contend that this does not produce a picture
true to life is idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal
life; to the best that good men and good women can do at level best.

"I care very little for the magazine or newspaper critics who
proclaim that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my
pictures of life are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I
glory in them! They are straight, living pictures from the lives of
men and women of morals, honour, and loving kindness. They form
`idealized pictures of life' because they are copies from life where
it touches religion, chastity, love, home, and hope of heaven
ultimately. None of these roads leads to publicity and the divorce
court. They all end in the shelter and seclusion of a home.

"Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to
teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is true
to life unless it is true to the worst in life, that the idea has
infected even the women."

In 1906, having seen a few of Mrs. Porter's studies of bird life,
Mr. Edward Bok telegraphed the author asking to meet him in
Chicago. She had a big portfolio of fine prints from plates for
which she had gone to the last extremity of painstaking care, and
the result was an order from Mr. Bok for a six months' series in
the Ladies' Home Journal of the author's best bird studies
accompanied by descriptions of how she secured them. This material
was later put in book form under the title, "What I Have Done with
Birds," and is regarded as authoritative on the subject of bird
photography and bird life, for in truth it covers every phase of the
life of the birds described, and contains much of other nature subjects.

By this time Mrs. Porter had made a contract with her publishers to
alternate her books. She agreed to do a nature book for love, and
then, by way of compromise, a piece of nature work spiced with
enough fiction to tempt her class of readers. In this way she hoped
that they would absorb enough of the nature work while reading the
fiction to send them afield, and at the same time keep in their
minds her picture of what she considers the only life worth living.
She was still assured that only a straight novel would "pay," but
she was living, meeting all her expenses, giving her family many
luxuries, and saving a little sum for a rainy day she foresaw on
her horoscope. To be comfortably clothed and fed, to have time and
tools for her work, is all she ever has asked of life.

Among Mrs. Porter's readers "At the Foot of the Rainbow" stands as
perhaps the author's strongest piece of fiction.

In August of 1909 two books on which the author had been working
for years culminated at the same time: a nature novel, and a
straight nature book. The novel was, in a way, a continuation of
"Freckles," filled as usual with wood lore, but more concerned with
moths than birds. Mrs. Porter had been finding and picturing
exquisite big night flyers during several years of field work among
the birds, and from what she could have readily done with them she
saw how it would be possible for a girl rightly constituted and
environed to make a living, and a good one, at such work. So was
conceived "A Girl of the Limberlost." "This comes fairly close to
my idea of a good book," she writes. "No possible harm can be done
any one in reading it. The book can, and does, present a hundred
pictures that will draw any reader in closer touch with nature and
the Almighty, my primal object in each line I write. The human side
of the book is as close a character study as I am capable of
making. I regard the character of Mrs. Comstock as the best
thought-out and the cleanest-cut study of human nature I have so
far been able to do. Perhaps the best justification of my idea of
this book came to me recently when I received an application from
the President for permission to translate it into Arabic, as the
first book to be used in an effort to introduce our methods of
nature study into the College of Cairo."

Hodder and Stoughton of London published the British edition
of this work.

At the same time that "A Girl of the Limberlost" was published
there appeared the book called "Birds of the Bible." This volume
took shape slowly. The author made a long search for each bird
mentioned in the Bible, how often, where, why; each quotation
concerning it in the whole book, every abstract reference, why
made, by whom, and what it meant. Then slowly dawned the sane and
true things said of birds in the Bible compared with the amazing
statements of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Pliny, and other writers of
about the same period in pagan nations. This led to a search for
the dawn of bird history and for the very first pictures preserved
of them. On this book the author expended more work than on any
other she has ever written.

In 1911 two more books for which Mrs. Porter had gathered material
for long periods came to a conclusion on the same date: "Music of
the Wild" and "The Harvester." The latter of these was a nature
novel; the other a frank nature book, filled with all outdoors- a
special study of the sounds one hears in fields and forests, and
photographic reproductions of the musicians and their instruments.

The idea of "The Harvester" was suggested to the author by an
editor who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it,
about the ginseng diggers in her part of the country. Mr. Porter
had bought ginseng for years for a drug store he owned; there were
several people he knew still gathering it for market, and growing
it was becoming a good business all over the country. Mrs. Porter
learned from the United States Pharmacopaeia and from various other
sources that the drug was used mostly by the Chinese, and with a
wholly mistaken idea of its properties. The strongest thing any
medical work will say for ginseng is that it is "~a very mild and
soothing drug." It seems that the Chinese buy and use it in
enormous quantities, in the belief that it is a remedy for almost
every disease to which humanity is heir; that it will prolong life,
and that it is a wonderful stimulant. Ancient medical works make
this statement, laying special emphasis upon its stimulating
qualities. The drug does none of these things. Instead of being a
stimulant, it comes closer to a sedative. This investigation set
the author on the search for other herbs that now are or might be
grown as an occupation. Then came the idea of a man who should grow
these drugs professionally, and of the sick girl healed by them.
"I could have gone to work and started a drug farm myself," remarks
Mrs. Porter, "with exactly the same profit and success as the
Harvester. I wrote primarily to state that to my personal
knowledge, clean, loving men still exist in this world, and that no
man is forced to endure the grind of city life if he wills
otherwise. Any one who likes, with even such simple means as herbs
he can dig from fence corners, may start a drug farm that in a
short time will yield him delightful work and independence. _I_
wrote the book as _I_ thought it should be written, to prove my
points and establish my contentions. I think it did. Men the globe
around promptly wrote me that they always had observed the moral
code; others that the subject never in all their lives had been
presented to them from my point of view, but now that it had been,
they would change and do what they could to influence all men to do
the same"

Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton publish a British edition of "The
Harvester," there is an edition in Scandinavian, it was running
serially in a German magazine, but for a time at least the German
and French editions that were arranged will be stopped by this war,
as there was a French edition of "The Song of the Cardinal."

After a short rest, the author began putting into shape a book for
which she had been compiling material since the beginning of field
work. From the first study she made of an exquisite big night moth,
Mrs. Porter used every opportunity to secure more and
representative studies of each family in her territory, and
eventually found the work so fascinating that she began hunting
cocoons and raising caterpillars in order to secure life histories
and make illustrations with fidelity to life. "It seems," comments
the author, "that scientists and lepidopterists from the beginning
have had no hesitation in describing and using mounted moth and
butterfly specimens for book text and illustration, despite the
fact that their colours fade rapidly, that the wings are always in
unnatural positions, and the bodies shrivelled. I would quite as
soon accept the mummy of any particular member of the Rameses
family as a fair representation of the living man, as a mounted
moth for a live one."

When she failed to secure the moth she wanted in a living and
perfect specimen for her studies, the author set out to raise one,
making photographic studies from the eggs through the entire life
process. There was one June during which she scarcely slept for
more than a few hours of daytime the entire month. She turned her
bedroom into a hatchery, where were stored the most precious
cocoons; and if she lay down at night it was with those she thought
would produce moths before morning on her pillow, where she could
not fail to hear them emerging. At the first sound she would be up
with notebook in hand, and by dawn, busy with cameras. Then she
would be forced to hurry to the darkroom and develop her plates in
order to be sure that she had a perfect likeness, before releasing
the specimen, for she did release all she produced except one pair
of each kind, never having sold a moth, personally. Often where the
markings were wonderful and complicated, as soon as the wings were
fully developed Mrs. Porter copied the living specimen in water
colours for her illustrations, frequently making several copies in
order to be sure that she laid on the colour enough brighter than
her subject so that when it died it would be exactly the same shade.

"Never in all my life," writes the author, "have I had such
exquisite joy in work as I had in painting the illustrations for
this volume of `Moths of the Limberlost.' Colour work had advanced
to such a stage that I knew from the beautiful reproductions in
Arthur Rackham's `Rheingold and Valkyrie' and several other books
on the market, that time so spent would not be lost. Mr. Doubleday
had assured me personally that I might count on exact reproduction,
and such details of type and paper as I chose to select. I used the
easel made for me when a girl, under the supervision of my father,
and I threw my whole heart into the work of copying each line and
delicate shading on those wonderful wings, `all diamonded with panes
of quaint device, innumerable stains and splendid dyes,' as one
poet describes them. There were times, when in working a mist of
colour over another background, I cut a brush down to three hairs.
Some of these illustrations I sent back six and seven times, to be
worked over before the illustration plates were exact duplicates of
the originals, and my heart ached for the engravers, who must have
had Job-like patience; but it did not ache enough to stop me until
I felt the reproduction exact. This book tells its own story of
long and patient waiting for a specimen, of watching, of
disappointments, and triumphs. I love it especially among my book
children because it represents my highest ideals in the making of
a nature book, and I can take any skeptic afield and prove the
truth of the natural history it contains."

In August of 1913 the author's novel "Laddie" was published in New
York, London, Sydney and Toronto simultaneously. This book contains
the same mixture of romance and nature interest as the others, and
is modelled on the same plan of introducing nature objects peculiar
to the location, and characters, many of whom are from life,
typical of the locality at a given period. The first thing many
critics said of it was that "no such people ever existed, and no
such life was ever lived." In reply to this the author said: "Of a
truth, the home I described in this book I knew to the last grain
of wood in the doors, and I painted, it with absolute accuracy; and
many of the people I described I knew more intimately than I ever
have known any others. ~Taken as a whole it represents a perfectly
faithful picture of home life, in a family who were reared and
educated exactly as this book indicates. There was such a man as
Laddie, and he was as much bigger and better than my description of
him as a real thing is always better than its presentment. The only
difference, barring the nature work, between my books and those of
many other writers, is that I prefer to describe and to perpetuate
the ~best I have known in life; whereas many authors seem to feel
that they have no hope of achieving a high literary standing unless
they delve in and reproduce the ~worst.

"To deny that wrong and pitiful things exist in life is folly, but
to believe that these things are made better by promiscuous
discussion at the hands of writers who ~fail to prove by their
books that their viewpoint is either right, clean, or helpful, is
close to insanity. If there is to be any error on either side in a
book, then God knows it is far better that it should be upon the
side of pure sentiment and high ideals than upon that of a too
loose discussion of subjects which often open to a large part of
the world their first knowledge of such forms of sin, profligate
expenditure, and waste of life's best opportunities. There is one
great beauty in idealized romance: reading it can make no one worse
than he is, while it may help thousands to a cleaner life and
higher inspiration than they ever before have known."

Mrs. Porter has written ten books, and it is not out of place here
to express her attitude toward them. Each was written, she says,
from her heart's best impulses. They are as clean and helpful as
she knew how to make them, as beautiful and interesting. She has
never spared herself in the least degree, mind or body, when it
came to giving her best, and she has never considered money in
relation to what she was writing.

During the hard work and exposure of those early years, during
rainy days and many nights in the darkroom, she went straight ahead
with field work, sending around the globe for books and delving to
secure material for such books as "Birds of the Bible," "Music of
the Wild," and "Moths of the Limberlost." Every day devoted to such
work was "commercially" lost, as publishers did not fail to tell
her. But that was the work she could do, and do with exceeding joy.
She could do it better pictorially, on account of her lifelong
knowledge of living things afield, than any other woman had as yet
had the strength and nerve to do it. It was work in which she
gloried, and she persisted. "Had I been working for money,"
comments the author, "not one of these nature books ever would have
been written, or an illustration made."

When the public had discovered her and given generous approval to
"A Girl of the Limberlost," when "The Harvester" had established a
new record, that would have been the time for the author to prove
her commercialism by dropping nature work, and plunging headlong
into books it would pay to write, and for which many publishers
were offering alluring sums. Mrs. Porter's answer was the issuing
of such books as "Music of the Wild" and "Moths of the Limberlost."
No argument is necessary. Mr. Edward Shuman, formerly critic of the
Chicago Record-Herald, was impressed by this method of work and
pointed it out in a review. It appealed to Mr. Shuman, when "Moths
of the Limberlost" came in for review, following the tremendous
success of "The Harvester," that had the author been working for
money, she could have written half a dozen more "Harvesters" while
putting seven years of field work, on a scientific subject, into a
personally illustrated work.

In an interesting passage dealing with her books, Mrs. Porter
writes: "I have done three times the work on my books of fiction
that I see other writers putting into a novel, in order to make all
natural history allusions accurate and to write them in such
fashion that they will meet with the commendation of high schools,
colleges, and universities using what I write as text books, and
for the homes that place them in their libraries. I am perfectly
willing to let time and the hearts of the people set my work in its
ultimate place. I have no delusions concerning it.

"To my way of thinking and working the greatest service a piece of
fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of
life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows
him where he can be a gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier man, it is
a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one beauty in nature
he never saw for himself, and leads him one step toward the God of
the Universe, it is a beneficial book, for one step into the
miracles of nature leads to that long walk, the glories of which so
strengthen even a boy who thinks he is dying, that he faces his
struggle like a gladiator."

During the past ten years thousands of people have sent the author
word that through her books they have been led afield and to their
first realization of the beauties of nature her mail brings an
average of ten such letters a day, mostly from students, teachers,
and professional people of our largest cities. It can probably be
said in all truth of her nature books and nature novels, that in
the past ten years they have sent more people afield than all the
scientific writings of the same period. That is a big statement,
but it is very likely pretty close to the truth. Mrs. Porter has
been asked by two London and one Edinburgh publishers for the
privilege of bringing out complete sets of her nature books, but as
yet she has not felt ready to do this.

In bringing this sketch of Gene Stratton-Porter to a close it will
be interesting to quote the author's own words describing the
Limberlost Swamp, its gradual disappearance under the encroachments
of business, and her removal to a new field even richer in natural
beauties. She says: "In the beginning of the end a great swamp
region lay in northeastern Indiana. Its head was in what is now
Noble and DeKalb counties; its body in Allen and Wells, and its
feet in southern Adams and northern Jay The Limberlost lies at the
foot and was, when I settled near it, ~exactly as described in my
books. The process of dismantling it was told in, Freckles, to
start with, carried on in `A Girl of the Limberlost,' and finished
in `Moths of the Limberlost.' Now it has so completely fallen prey
to commercialism through the devastation of lumbermen, oilmen, and
farmers, that I have been forced to move my working territory and
build a new cabin about seventy miles north, at the head of the
swamp in Noble county, where there are many lakes, miles of
unbroken marsh, and a far greater wealth of plant and animal life
than existed during my time in the southern part. At the north end
every bird that frequents the Central States is to be found. Here
grow in profusion many orchids, fringed gentians, cardinal flowers,
turtle heads, starry campions, purple gerardias, and grass of
Parnassus. In one season I have located here almost every flower
named in the botanies as native to these regions and several that
I can find in no book in my library.

"But this change of territory involves the purchase of fifteen
acres of forest and orchard land, on a lake shore in marsh country.
It means the building of a permanent, all-year-round home, which
will provide the comforts of life for my family and furnish a
workshop consisting of a library, a photographic darkroom and
negative closet, and a printing room for me. I could live in such
a home as I could provide on the income from my nature work alone;
but when my working grounds were cleared, drained and ploughed up,
literally wiped from the face of the earth, I never could have
moved to new country had it not been for the earnings of the
novels, which I now spend, and always have spent, in great part
~upon my nature work. Based on this plan of work and life I have
written ten books, and `please God I live so long,' I shall write
ten more. Possibly every one of them will be located in northern
Indiana. Each one will be filled with all the field and woods
legitimately falling to its location and peopled with the best men
and women I have known."



                              Chapter 1


                      THE RAT-CATCHERS OF THE WABASH

"Hey, you swate-scented little heart-warmer!" cried Jimmy Malone,
as he lifted his tenth trap, weighted with a struggling muskrat,
from the Wabash. "Varmint you may be to all the rist of creation,
but you mane a night at Casey's to me."

Jimmy whistled softly as he reset the trap. For the moment he
forgot that he was five miles from home, that it was a mile farther
to the end of his line at the lower curve of Horseshoe Bend, that
his feet and fingers were almost freezing, and that every rat of
the ten now in the bag on his back had made him thirstier. He
shivered as the cold wind sweeping the curves of the river struck
him; but when an unusually heavy gust dropped the ice and snow from
a branch above him on the back of his head, he laughed, as he ducked
and cried: "Kape your snowballing till the Fourth of July, will you!"

"Chick-a-dee-dee-dee!" remarked a tiny gray bird on the tree above
him. Jimmy glanced up. "Chickie, Chickie, Chickie," he said. "I
can't till by your dress whether you are a hin or a rooster. But I
can till by your employmint that you are working for grub. Have to
hustle lively for every worm you find, don't you, Chickie? Now me,
I'm hustlin' lively for a drink, and I be domn if it seems
nicessary with a whole river of drinkin' stuff flowin' right under
me feet. But the old Wabash ain't runnin "wine and milk and honey"
not by the jug-full. It seems to be compounded of aquil parts of
mud, crude ile, and rain water. If 'twas only runnin' Melwood, be
gorry, Chickie, you'd see a mermaid named Jimmy Malone sittin' on
the Kingfisher Stump, combin' its auburn hair with a breeze, and
scoopin' whiskey down its gullet with its tail fin. No, hold on,
Chickie, you wouldn't either. I'm too flat-chisted for a mermaid,
and I'd have no time to lave off gurglin' for the hair-combin' act,
which, Chickie, to me notion is as issential to a mermaid as the
curves. I'd be a sucker, the biggest sucker in the Gar-hole,
Chickie bird. I'd be an all-day sucker, be gobs; yis, and an all-
night sucker, too. Come to think of it, Chickie, be domn if I'd be
a sucker at all. Look at the mouths of thim! Puckered up with a
drawstring! Oh, Hell on the Wabash, Chickie, think of Jimmy Malone
lyin' at the bottom of a river flowin' with Melwood, and a
puckerin'-string mouth! Wouldn't that break the heart of you? I
know what I'd be. I'd be the Black Bass of Horseshoe Bend, Chickie,
and I'd locate just below the shoals headin' up stream, and I'd
hold me mouth wide open till I paralyzed me jaws so I couldn't shut
thim. I'd just let the pure stuff wash over me gills constant,
world without end. Good-by, Chickie. Hope you got your grub, and
pretty soon I'll have enough drink to make me feel like I was the
Bass for one night, anyway."

Jimmy hurried to his next trap, which was empty, but the one after
that contained a rat, and there were footprints in the snow.
"That's where the porrage-heart of the Scotchman comes in," said
Jimmy, as he held up the rat by one foot, and gave it a sharp rap
over the head with the trap to make sure it was dead. "Dannie could
no more hear a rat fast in one of me traps and not come over and
put it out of its misery, than he could dance a hornpipe. And him
only sicond hand from hornpipe land, too! But his feet's like lead.
Poor Dannie! He gets just about half the rats I do. He niver did
have luck."

Jimmy's gay face clouded for an instant. The twinkle faded from his
eyes, and a look of unrest swept into them. He muttered something,
and catching up his bag, shoved in the rat. As he reset the trap,
a big crow dropped from branch to branch on a sycamore above him,
and his back scarcely was turned before it alighted on the ice, and
ravenously picked at three drops of blood purpling there.

Away down the ice-sheeted river led Dannie's trail, showing plainly
across the snow blanket. The wind raved through the trees, and
around the curves of the river. The dark earth of the banks peeping
from under overhanging ice and snow, looked like the entrance to
deep mysterious caves. Jimmy's superstitious soul readily peopled
them with goblins and devils. He shuddered, and began to talk aloud
to cheer himself. "Elivin muskrat skins, times fifteen cints
apiece, one dollar sixty-five. That will buy more than I can hold.
Hagginy! Won't I be takin' one long fine gurgle of the pure stuff!
And there's the boys! I might do the grand for once. One on me for
the house! And I might pay something on my back score, but first
I'll drink till I swell like a poisoned pup. And I ought to get
Mary that milk pail she's been kickin' for this last month. Women
and cows are always kickin'! If the blarsted cow hadn't kicked a
hole in the pail, there'd be no need of Mary kicking for a new one.
But dough is dubious soldering. Mary says it's bad enough on the
dish pan, but it positively ain't hilthy about the milk pail, and
she is right. We ought to have a new pail. I guess I'll get it
first, and fill up on what's left. One for a quarter will do. And
I've several traps yet, I may get a few more rats."

The virtuous resolve to buy a milk pail before he quenched the
thirst which burned him, so elated Jimmy with good opinion of
himself that he began whistling gayly as he strode toward his next
trap. And by that token, Dannie Macnoun, resetting an empty trap a
quarter of a mile below, knew that Jimmy was coming, and that as
usual luck was with him. Catching his blood and water dripping bag,
Dannie dodged a rotten branch that came crashing down under the
weight of its icy load, and stepping out on the river, he pulled on
his patched wool-lined mittens as he waited for Jimmy.

"How many, Dannie?" called Jimmy from afar.

"Seven," answered Dannie. "What for ye?"

"Elivin," replied Jimmy, with a bit of unconscious swagger. "I am
havin' poor luck to-day."

"How mony wad satisfy ye?" asked Dannie sarcastically.

"Ain't got time to figure that," answered Jimmy, working in a
double shuffle as he walked. "Thrash around a little, Dannie. It
will warm you up."

"I am no cauld," answered Dannie.

"No cauld!" imitated Jimmy. "No cauld! Come to observe you closer,
I do detect symptoms of sunstroke in the ridness of your face, and
the whiteness about your mouth; but the frost on your neck scarf,
and the icicles fistooned around the tail of your coat, tell a
different story.

"Dannie, you remind me of the baptizin' of Pete Cox last winter.
Pete's nothin' but skin and bone, and he niver had a square meal in
his life to warm him. It took pushin' and pullin' to get him in the
water, and a scum froze over while he was under. Pete came up
shakin' like the feeder on a thrashin' machine, and whin he could
spake at all, `Bless Jasus,' says he, `I'm jist as wa-wa-warm as I
wa-wa-want to be.' So are you, Dannie, but there's a difference in
how warm folks want to be. For meself, now, I could aisily bear a
little more hate."

"It's honest, I'm no cauld," insisted Dannie; and he might have
added that if Jimmy would not fill his system with Casey's poisons,
that degree of cold would not chill and pinch him either. But being
Dannie, he neither thought nor said it.
`"Why, I'm frozen to me sowl!" cried Jimmy, as he changed the rat
bag to his other hand, and beat the empty one against his leg."
Say, Dannie, where do you think the Kingfisher is wintering?"

"And the Black Bass," answered Dannie. "Where do ye suppose the
Black Bass is noo?"

"Strange you should mintion the Black Bass," said Jimmy. "I was
just havin' a little talk about him with a frind of mine named
Chickie-dom, no, Chickie-dee, who works a grub stake back there.

The Bass might be lyin' in the river bed right under our feet.
Don't you remimber the time whin I put on three big cut-worms, and
skittered thim beyond the log that lays across here, and he lept
from the water till we both saw him the best we ever did, and
nothin' but my old rotten line ever saved him? Or he might be where
it slumps off just below the Kingfisher stump. But I know where he
is all right. He's down in the Gar-hole, and he'll come back here
spawning time, and chase minnows when the Kingfisher comes home.
But, Dannie, where the nation do you suppose the Kingfisher is?"

"No' so far away as ye might think," replied Dannie. "Doc Hues
told me that coming on the train frae Indianapolis on the fifteenth
of December, he saw one fly across a little pond juist below
Winchester. I believe they go south slowly, as the cold drives
them, and stop near as they can find guid fishing. Dinna that stump
look lonely wi'out him?"

"And sound lonely without the Bass slashing around! I am going to have
that Bass this summer if I don't do a thing but fish!" vowed Jimmy.

"I'll surely have a try at him," answered Dannie, with a twinkle in
his gray eyes. "We've caught most everything else in the Wabash, and
our reputation fra taking guid fish is ahead of any one on the river,
except the Kingfisher. Why the Diel dinna one of us haul out that Bass?"

"Ain't I just told you that I am going to hook him this summer?"
shivered Jimmy.

"Dinna ye hear me mention that I intended to take a try at him mysel'?"
questioned Dannie. "Have ye forgotten that I know how to fish?"

"'Nough breeze to-day without starting a Highlander," interposed
Jimmy hastily. "I believe I hear a rat in my next trap. That will
make me twilve, and it's good and glad of it I am for I've to walk
to town when my line is reset. There's something Mary wants."

"If Mary wants ye to go to town, why dinna ye leave me to finish
your traps, and start now?" asked Dannie. "It's getting dark, and
if ye are so late ye canna see the drifts, ye never can cut across
the fields; fra the snow is piled waist high, and it's a mile
farther by the road."

"I got to skin my rats first, or I'll be havin' to ask credit
again," replied Jimmy.

"That's easy," answered Dannie." Turn your rats over to me richt
noo. I'll give ye market price fra them in cash."

"But the skinnin' of them," objected Jimmy for decency sake, though
his eyes were beginning to shine and his fingers to tremble.

"Never ye mind about that," retorted Dannie. " I like to take my
time to it, and fix them up nice. Elivin, did ye say?"

"Elivin," answered Jimmy, breaking into a jig, supposedly to keep
his feet warm, in reality because he could not stand quietly while
Dannie pulled off his mittens, got out and unstrapped his wallet,
and carefully counted out the money. "Is that all ye need?" he asked.

For an instant Jimmy hesitated. Missing a chance to get even a few
cents more meant a little shorter time at Casey's. "That's enough,
I think," he said. "I wish I'd staid out of matrimony, and then
maybe I could iver have a cint of me own. You ought to be glad you
haven't a woman to consume ivery penny you earn before it reaches
your pockets, Dannie Micnoun."

"I hae never seen Mary consume much but calico and food," Dannie
said dryly.

"Oh, it ain't so much what a woman really spinds," said Jimmy,
peevishly, as he shoved the money into his pocket, and pulled on
his mittens.

"It's what you know she would spind if she had the chance."

"I dinna think ye'll break up on that," laughed Dannie.

And that was what Jimmy wanted. So long as he could set Dannie
laughing, he could mold him.

"No, but I'll break down," lamented Jimmy in sore self-pity, as he
remembered the quarter sacred to the purchase of the milk pail.

"Ye go on, and hurry," urged Dannie. "If ye dinna start home by
seven, I'll be combing the drifts fra ye before morning."

"Anything I can do for you?" asked Jimmy, tightening his old red
neck scarf.

"Yes," answered Dannie. "Do your errand and start straight home,
your teeth are chattering noo. A little more exposure, and the
rheumatism will be grinding ye again. Ye will hurry, Jimmy?"

"Sure!" cried Jimmy, ducking under a snow slide, and breaking into
a whistle as he turned toward the road.

Dannie's gaze followed Jimmy's retreating figure until he climbed
the bank, and was lost in the woods, and the light in his eyes was
the light of love. He glanced at the sky, and hurried down the
river. First across to Jimmy's side to gather his rats and reset
his traps, then to his own. But luck seemed to have turned, for all
the rest of Dannie's were full, and all of Jimmy's were empty. But
as he was gone, it was not necessary for Dannie to slip across and
fill them, as was his custom when they worked together. He would
divide the rats at skinning time, so that Jimmy would have just
twice as many as he, because Jimmy had a wife to support. The last
trap of the line lay a little below the curve of Horseshoe Bend,
and there Dannie twisted the tops of the bags together, climbed the
bank, and struck across Rainbow Bottom. He settled his load to his
shoulders, and glanced ahead to choose the shortest route. He
stopped suddenly with a quick intake of breath.

"God!" he cried reverently. "Hoo beautifu' are Thy works."

The ice-covered Wabash circled Rainbow Bottom like a broad white
frame, and inside it was a perfect picture wrought in crystal white
and snow shadows. The blanket on the earth lay smoothly in even
places, rose with knolls, fell with valleys, curved over prostrate
logs, heaped in mounds where bushes grew thickly, and piled high in
drifts where the wind blew free. In the shelter of the bottom the
wind had not stripped the trees of their loads as it had those
along the river. The willows, maples, and soft woods bent almost to
earth with their shining burden; but the stout, stiffly upstanding
trees, the oaks, elms, and cottonwoods defied the elements to bow
their proud heads. While the three mighty trunks of the great
sycamore in the middle looked white as the snow, and dwarfed its
companions as it never had in summer; its wide-spreading branches
were sharply cut against the blue background, and they tossed their
frosted balls in the face of Heaven. The giant of Rainbow Bottom
might be broken, but it never would bend. Every clambering vine,
every weed and dried leaf wore a coat of lace-webbed frostwork. The
wind swept a mist of tiny crystals through the air, and from the
shelter of the deep woods across the river a Cardinal whistled gayly.

The bird of Good Cheer, whistling no doubt on an empty crop, made
Dannie think of Jimmy, and his unfailing fountain of mirth. Dear
Jimmy! Would he ever take life seriously? How good he was to tramp
to town and back after five miles on the ice. He thought of Mary
with almost a touch of impatience. What did the woman want that was
so necessary as to send a man to town after a day on the ice? Jimmy
would be dog tired when he got home. Dannie decided to hurry, and
do the feeding and get in the wood before he began to skin the rats.

He found walking uncertain. He plunged into unsuspected hollows,
and waded drifts, so that he was panting when he reached the lane.
From there he caught the gray curl of smoke against the sky from
one of two log cabins side by side at the top of the embankment, and
he almost ran toward them. Mary might think they were late at the
traps, and be out doing the feeding, and it would be cold for a woman.

On reaching his own door, he dropped the rat bags inside, and then
hurried to the yard of the other cabin. He gathered a big load of
wood in his arms, and stamping the snow from his feet, called
"Open!" at the door. Dannie stepped inside and filled the empty box.
With smiling eyes he turned to Mary, as he brushed the snow and
moss from his sleeves.

"Nothing but luck to-day," he said. "Jimmy took elivin fine skins
frae his traps before he started to town, and I got five more that
are his, and I hae eight o' my own."

Mary looked such a dream to Dannie, standing there all pink and
warm and tidy in her fresh blue dress, that he blinked and smiled,
half bewildered.

"What did Jimmy go to town for?" she asked.

"Whatever it was ye wanted," answered Dannie.

"What was it I wanted?" persisted Mary.

"He dinna tell me," replied Dannie, and the smile wavered.

"Me, either," said Mary, and she stooped and picked up her sewing.

Dannie went out and gently closed the door. He stood for a second
on the step, forcing himself to take an inventory of the work.
There were the chickens to feed, and the cows to milk, feed, and
water. Both the teams must be fed and bedded, a fire in his own
house made, and two dozen rats skinned, and the skins put to
stretch and cure. And at the end of it all, instead of a bed and
rest, there was every probability that he must drive to town after
Jimmy; for Jimmy could get helpless enough to freeze in a drift on
a dollar sixty-five.

"Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy!" muttered Dannie." I wish ye wadna." And he was
not thinking of himself, but of the eyes of the woman inside.

So Dannie did all the work, and cooked his supper, because he never
ate in Jimmy's cabin when Jimmy was not there. Then he skinned
rats, and watched the clock, because if Jimmy did not come by
eleven, it meant he must drive to town and bring him home. No
wonder Jimmy chilled at the trapping when he kept his blood on fire
with whiskey. At half-past ten, Dannie, with scarcely half the rats
finished, went out into the storm and hitched to the single buggy.
Then he tapped at Mary Malone's door, quite softly, so that he
would not disturb her if she had gone to bed. She was not sleeping,
however, and the loneliness of her slight figure, as she stood with
the lighted room behind her, struck Dannie forcibly, so that his
voice trembled with pity as he said: "Mary, I've run out o' my
curing compound juist in the midst of skinning the finest bunch o'
rats we've taken frae the traps this winter. I am going to drive to
town fra some more before the stores close, and we will be back in
less than an hour. I thought I'd tell ye, so if ye wanted me ye wad
know why I dinna answer. Ye winna be afraid, will ye?"

"No," replied Mary, " I won't be afraid."

"Bolt the doors, and pile on plenty of wood to keep ye warm," said
Dannie as he turned away.

Just for a minute Mary stared out into the storm. Then a gust of
wind nearly swept her from her feet, and she pushed the door shut,
and slid the heavy bolt into place. For a little while she leaned
and listened to the storm outside. She was a clean, neat, beautiful
Irish woman. Her eyes were wide and blue, her cheeks pink, and her
hair black and softly curling about her face and neck. The room in
which she stood was neat as its keeper. The walls were whitewashed,
and covered with prints, pictures, and some small tanned skins.
Dried grasses and flowers filled the vases on the mantle. The floor
was neatly carpeted with a striped rag carpet, and in the big open
fireplace a wood fire roared. In an opposite corner stood a modern
cooking stove, the pipe passing through a hole in the wall, and a
door led into a sleeping room beyond.

As her eyes swept the room they rested finally on a framed
lithograph of the Virgin, with the Infant in her arms. Slowly Mary
advanced, her gaze fast on the serene pictured face of the mother
clasping her child. Before it she stood staring. Suddenly her
breast began to heave, and the big tears brimmed from her eyes and
slid down her cheeks.

"Since you look so wise, why don't you tell me why?" she demanded.
"Oh, if you have any mercy, tell me why!"

Then before the steady look in the calm eyes, she hastily made the
sign of the cross, and slipping to the floor, she laid her head on
a chair, and sobbed aloud.



                                Chapter II


                       RUBEN O'KHAYAM AND THE MILK PAIL

JIMMY MALONE, carrying a shinning tin milk pail, stepped into
Casey's saloon and closed the door behind him.


         "E' much as wine has played the Infidel,
          And robbed me of my robe of Honor- well,
          I wonder what the Vinters buy
          One-half so precious as the stuff they sell."


Jimmy stared at the back of a man leaning against the bar, and
gazing lovingly at a glass of red wine, as he recited in mellow,
swinging tones. Gripping the milk pail, Jimmy advanced a step. The
man stuck a thumb in the belt of his Norfolk jacket, and the verses
flowed on:


         "The grape that can with logic absolute
          The two and seventy jarring sects confute:
          The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice
          Life's leaden metal into Gold transmute."


Jimmy's mouth fell open, and he slowly nodded indorsement of the
sentiment. The man lifted his glass.


         "Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
          Before we too into the Dust descend;
          Yesterday this Day's Madness did prepare;
          To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
          Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why:
          Drink! for you know not why you go nor where."


Jimmy set the milk pail on the bar and faced the man.

"'Fore God, that's the only sensible word I ever heard on my side
of the quistion in all me life. And to think that it should come
from the mouth of a man wearing such a Go-to-Hell coat!"

Jimmy shoved the milk pail in front of the stranger. "In the name
of humanity, impty yourself of that," he said. "Fill me pail
with the stuff and let me take it home to Mary. She's always got
the bist of the argumint, but I'm thinkin' that would cork her. You
won't?" questioned Jimmy resentfully. "Kape it to yoursilf,
thin, like you did your wine." He shoved the bucket toward the
barkeeper, and emptied his pocket on the bar. "There, Casey, you
be the Sovereign Alchemist, and transmute that metal into Melwood
pretty quick, for I've not wet me whistle in three days, and the
belly of me is filled with burnin' autumn leaves. Gimme a loving
cup, and come on boys, this is on me while it lasts."

The barkeeper swept the coin into the till, picked up the bucket,
and started back toward a beer keg.

"Oh, no you don't!" cried Jimmy. "Come back here and count that
`leaden metal,' and then be transmutin' it into whiskey straight,
the purest gold you got. You don't drown out a three-days' thirst
with beer. You ought to give me 'most two quarts for that."

The barkeeper was wise. He knew that what Jimmy started would go on
with men who could pay, and he filled the order generously.

Jimmy picked up the pail. He dipped a small glass in the liquor,
and held near an ounce aloft.


         "I wonder what the Vinters buy
          One-half so precious as the stuff they sell?"


he quoted. "Down goes!" and he emptied the glass at a draft. Then he
walked to the group at the stove, and began dipping a drink for each.

When Jimmy came to a gray-haired man, with a high forehead and an
intellectual face, he whispered: "Take your full time, Cap. Who's
the rhymin' inkybator?"

"Thread man, Boston," mouthed the Captain, as he reached for the
glass with trembling fingers. Jimmy held on. "Do you know that
stuff he's giving off?" The Captain nodded, and rose to his feet.
He always declared he could feel it farther if he drank standing.

"What's his name?" whispered Jimmy, releasing the glass. "Rubaiyat,
Omar Khayyam," panted the Captain, and was lost. Jimmy finished
the round of his friends, and then approached the bar.

His voice was softening. "Mister Ruben O'Khayam," he said, "it's me
private opinion that ye nade lace-trimmed pantalettes and a sash to
complate your costume, but barrin' clothes, I'm entangled in the
thrid of your discourse. Bein' a Boston man meself, it appeals to
me, that I detict the refinemint of the East in yer voice. Now
these, me frinds, that I've just been tratin', are men of these
parts; but we of the middle East don't set up to equal the culture
of the extreme East. So, Mr. O'Khayam, solely for the benefit you
might be to us, I'm askin' you to join me and me frinds in the
momenchous initiation of me new milk pail."

Jimmy lifted a brimming glass, and offered it to the Thread Man.
"Do you transmute?" he asked. Now if the Boston man had looked
Jimmy in the eye, and said "I do," this book would not have been
written. But he did not. He looked at the milk pail, and the glass,
which had passed through the hands of a dozen men in a little
country saloon away out in the wilds of Indiana, and said: "I do
not care to partake of further refreshment; if I can be of
intellectual benefit, I might remain for a time."

For a flash Jimmy lifted the five feet ten of his height to six;
but in another he shrank below normal. What appeared to the Thread
Man to be a humble, deferential seeker after wisdom, led him to one
of the chairs around the big coal base burner. But the boys who
knew Jimmy were watching the whites of his eyes, as they drank the
second round. At this stage Jimmy was on velvet. How long he
remained there depended on the depth of Melwood in the milk pail
between his knees. He smiled winningly on the Thread Man.

"Ye know, Mister O'Khayam," he said, "at the present time you are
located in one of the wooliest parts of the wild East. I don't
suppose anything woolier could be found on the plains of Nebraska
where I am reliably informed they've stuck up a pole and labeled it
the cinter of the United States. Being a thousand miles closer that
pole than you are in Boston, naturally we come by that distance
closer to the great wool industry. Most of our wool here grows on
our tongues, and we shear it by this transmutin' process, concerning
which you have discoursed so beautiful. But barrin' the shearin' of
our wool, we are the mildest, most sheepish fellows you could imagine.
I don't reckon now there is a man among us who could be induced to
blat or to butt, under the most tryin' circumstances. My Mary's got
a little lamb, and all the rist of the boys are lambs. But all the
lambs are waned, and clusterin' round the milk pail. Ain't that
touchin'? Come on, now, Ruben, ile up and edify us some more!"

"On what point do you seek enlightenment?" inquired the Thread Man.

Jimmy stretched his long legs, and spat against the stove in pure delight.

"Oh, you might loosen up on the work of a man," he suggested.
"These lambs of Casey's fold may larn things from you to help thim
in the striss of life. Now here's Jones, for instance, he's holdin'
togither a gang of sixty gibbering Atalyans; any wan of thim would
cut his throat and skip in the night for a dollar, but he kapes the
beast in thim under, and they're gettin' out gravel for the bed of
a railway. Bingham there is oil. He's punchin' the earth full of
wan thousand foot holes, and sendin' off two hundred quarts of
nitroglycerine at the bottom of them, and pumpin' the accumulation
across continents to furnish folks light and hate. York here is
runnin' a field railway between Bluffton and Celina, so that I can
get to the river and the resurvoir to fish without walkin'. Haines
is bossin' a crew of forty Canadians and he's takin' the timber
from the woods hereabouts, and sending it to be made into boats to
carry stuff across sea. Meself, and me partner, Dannie Micnoun, are
the lady-likest lambs in the bunch. We grow grub to feed folks in
summer and trap for skins to cover 'em in winter. Corn is our great
commodity. Plowin' and hoein' it in summer, and huskin' it in the
fall is sich lamb-like work. But don't mintion it in the same brith
with tendin' our four dozen fur traps on a twenty-below-zero day.
Freezing hands and fate, and fallin' into air bubbles, and building
fires to thaw out our frozen grub. Now here among us poor little,
transmutin', lambs you come, a raging lion, ripresentin' the
cultour and rayfinement of the far East. By the pleats on your
breast you show us the style. By the thrid case in your hand you
furnish us material so that our women can tuck their petticoats so
fancy, and by the book in your head you teach us your sooperiority.
By the same token, I wish I had that book in me head, for I could
just squelch Dannie and Mary with it complate. Say, Mister
O'Khayam, next time you come this way bring me a copy. I'm
wantin' it bad. I got what you gave off all secure, but I take it
there's more. No man goin' at that clip could shut off with thim
few lines. Do you know the rist?"

The Thread Man knew the most of it, and although he was very
uncomfortable, he did not know just how to get away, so he recited
it. The milk pail was empty now, and Jimmy had almost forgotten
that it was a milk pail, and seemed inclined to resent the fact
that it had gone empty. He beat time on the bottom of it, and
frequently interrupted the Thread Man to repeat a couplet which
particularly suited him. By and by he got to his feet and began
stepping off a slow dance to a sing-song repetition of lines that
sounded musical to him, all the time marking the measures
vigorously on the pail. When he tired of a couplet, he pounded the
pail over the bar, stove, or chairs in encore, until the Thread Man
could think up another to which he could dance.


          "Wine! Wine! Wine! Red Wine!
           The Nightingale cried to the rose,"


chanted Jimmy, thumping the pail in time, and stepping off the
measures with feet that scarcely seemed to touch the floor. He
flung his hat to the barkeeper, and his coat on a chair, ruffled
his fingers through his thick auburn hair, and holding the pail
under one arm, he paused, panting for breath and begging for more.
The Thread Man sat on the edge of his chair, and the eyes he
fastened on Jimmy were beginning to fill with interest.


          "Come fill the Cup and in the fire of Spring
           Your Winter-Garment of Repentance fling.
           The bird of time has but a little way to flutter
           And the bird is on the wing."


Smash came the milk pail across the bar. "Hooray!" shouted Jimmy.
"Besht yet!" Bang! Bang! He was off." Bird ish on the wing," he
chanted, and his feet flew. "Come fill the cup, and in the firesh
of spring- Firesh of Spring, Bird ish on the Wing!" Between the
music of the milk pail, the brogue of the panted verses, and the
grace of Jimmy's flying feet, the Thread Man was almost prostrate. It
suddenly came to him that here might be a chance to have a great time.

"More!" gasped Jimmy. "Me some more!" The Thread Man wiped his eyes.


          "Wether the cup with sweet or bitter run,
           The wine of life keeps oozing drop by drop,
           The leaves of life keep falling one by one."


Away went Jimmy.


          "Swate or bitter run,
           Laves of life kape falling one by one."


Bang! Bang! sounded a new improvision on the sadly battered pail,
and to a new step Jimmy flashed back and forth the length of the
saloon. At last he paused to rest a second. "One more! Just one
more!" he begged.


          "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
           A jug of wine, a Loaf of Bread and Thou
           Beside me singing in the Wilderness.
           Oh, wilderness were Paradise enough!"


Jimmy's head dropped an instant. His feet slowly shuffled in
improvising a new step, and then he moved away, thumping the milk
pail and chanting:


          "A couple of fish poles underneath a tree,
           A bottle of Rye and Dannie beside me
           A fishing in the Wabash.
           Were the Wabash Paradise? ~Hully Gee!


"Tired out, he dropped across a chair facing the back and folded
his arms. He regained breath to ask the Thread Man: "Did you iver
have a frind?"

He had reached the confidential stage.

The Boston man was struggling to regain his dignity. He retained
the impression that at the wildest of the dance he had yelled and
patted time for Jimmy.

"I hope I have a host of friends," he said, settling his pleated coat.

"Damn hosht!" said Jimmy. "Jisht in way. Now I got one frind, hosht all
by himself. Be here pretty soon now. Alwaysh comesh nights like thish."

"Comes here?" inquired the Thread Man. "Am I to meet another
interesting character?"

"Yesh, comesh here. Comesh after me. Comesh like the clock
sthriking twelve. Don't he, boys?" inquired Jimmy. "But he ain't
no interesting character. Jisht common man, Dannie is. Honest man.
Never told a lie in his life. Yesh, he did, too. I forgot. He liesh
for me. Jish liesh and liesh. Liesh to Mary. Tells her any old
liesh to keep me out of schrape. You ever have frind hish up and
drive ten milesh for you night like thish, and liesh to get you out
of schrape?"

"I never needed any one to lie and get me out of a scrape,"
answered the Thread Man.

Jimmy sat straight and solemnly batted his eyes. "Gee! You musht
misshed mosht the fun!" he said. "Me, I ain't ever misshed any.
Always in schrape. But Dannie getsh me out. Good old Dannie. Jish
like dog. Take care me all me life. See? Old folks come on same
boat. Women get thick. Shettle beside. Build cabinsh together. Work
together, and domn if they didn't get shmall pox and die together.
Left me and Dannie. So we work together jish shame, and we
fallsh in love with the shame girl. Dannie too slow. I got her."
Jimmy wiped away great tears.

"How did you get her, Jimmy?" asked a man who remembered a story.

"How the nation did I get her?" Jimmy scratched his head, and
appealed to the Thread Man. "Dannie besht man. Milesh besht man!
Never lie- 'cept for me. Never drink- 'cept for me. Alwaysh save his
money- 'cept for me. Milesh besht man! Isn't he besht man, Spooley?"

"Ain't it true that you served Dannie a mean little trick?" asked
the man who remembered.

Jimmy wasn't quite drunk enough, and the violent exercise of the
dance somewhat sobered him. He glared at the man. "Whatsh you
talkin' about?" he demanded.

"I'm just asking you," said the man, "why, if you played straight
with Dannie about the girl, you never have had the face to go to
confession since you married her."

"Alwaysh send my wife," said Jimmy grandly. "Domsh any woman that
can't confiss enough for two!"

Then he hitched his chair closer to the Thread Man, and grew more
confidential. "Shee here," he said. "Firsht I see your pleated
coat, didn't like. But head's all right. Great head! Sthuck on
frillsh there! Want to be let in on something? Got enough city,
clubsh, an' all that? Want to taste real thing? Lesh go coon
huntin'. Theysh tree down Canoper, jish short pleashant walk, got
fify coons in it! Nobody knowsh the tree but me, shee? Been good to
ush boys. Sat on same kind of chairs we do. Educate ush up lot.
Know mosht that poetry till I die, shee? `Wonner wash vinters buy,
halfsh precious ash sthuff shell,' shee? I got it! Let you in on
real thing. Take grand big coon skinch back to Boston with you.
Ringsh on tail. Make wife fine muff, or fur trimmingsh. Good to
till boysh at club about, shee?"

"Are you asking me to go on a coon hunt with you?" demanded the
Thread Man. "When? Where?"

"Corshally invited," answered Jimmy. "To-morrow night. Canoper.
Show you plashe. Bill Duke's dogs. My gunsh. Moonsh shinin'. Dogs
howlin'. Shnow flying! Fify coonsh rollin' out one hole! Shoot all
dead! Take your pick! Tan skin for you myself! Roaring big firesh
warm by. Bag finesh sandwiches ever tasted. Milk pail pure gold
drink. No stop, slop out going over bridge. Take jug. Big jug. Toss
her up an' let her gurgle. Dogsh bark. Fire pop. Guns bang. Fifty
coons drop. Boysh all go. Want to get more education. Takes culture
to get woolsh off. Shay, will you go? "

"I wouldn't miss it for a thousand dollars," said the Thread Man.
"But what will I say to my house for being a day late?"

"Shay gotter grip," suggested Jimmy. "Never too late to getter
grip. Will you all go, boysh?"

There were not three men in the saloon who knew of a tree that had
contained a coon that winter, but Jimmy was Jimmy, and to be
trusted for an expedition of that sort; and all of them agreed to
be at the saloon ready for the hunt at nine o'clock the next night.
The Thread Man felt that he was going to see Life. He immediately
invited the boys to the bar to drink to the success of the hunt.

"You shoot own coon yourself," offered the magnanimous Jimmy. "You
may carrysh my gunsh, take first shot. First shot to Missher
O'Khayam, boysh, 'member that. Shay, can you hit anything? Take a
try now." Jimmy reached behind him, and shoved a big revolver into
the hand of the Thread Man. "Whersh target?" he demanded.

As he turned from the bar, the milk pail which he still carried
under his arm caught on an iron rod. Jimmy gave it a jerk, and
ripped the rim from the bottom. "Thish do," he said. "Splendid
marksh. Shinesh jish like coon's eyesh in torch light."

He carried the pail to the back wall and hung it over a nail. The
nail was straight, and the pail flaring. The pail fell. Jimmy
kicked it across the room, and then gathered it up, and drove a dent
in it with his heel that would hold over the nail. Then he went back
to the Thread Man." Theresh mark, Ruben. Blash away!" he said.

The Boston man hesitated. "Whatsh the matter? Cansh shoot off
nothing but your mouth?" demanded Jimmy. He caught the revolver and
fired three shots so rapidly that the sounds came almost as one.
Two bullets pierced the bottom of the pail, and the other the side
as it fell.

The door opened, and with the rush of cold air Jimmy gave just one
glance toward it, and slid the revolver into his pocket, reached
for his hat, and started in the direction of his coat. "Glad to see
you, Micnoun," he said. "If you are goingsh home, I'll jish ride
out with you. Good night, boysh. Don't forgetsh the coon hunt," and
Jimmy was gone.

A mi