The story that was “not quite in our tone” but that so impressed Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was What Happened to Alanna. On its publication S. S. McClure wrote to Mrs. Norris asking for her next work. She replied, giving him the date on which What Happened to Alanna had been submitted to McClure’s Magazine and the date on which it had been returned to her.

Her next six stories appeared in McClure’s. After that it seemed to the casual observer as if they were everywhere. In one month Mrs. Norris was on five tables of contents.

And then the Delineator offered a prize for a story of not more than 3,000 words. Mrs. Norris began one, and when she saw that it would run to 10,000 words, she laid it aside and wrote another. So the Delineator lost and the American Magazine gained Mother. On the story’s appearance five publishers asked Mrs. Norris to enlarge it sufficiently to make a book.

Enlarging short stories into novels is a ticklish business. Successes are few. Mrs. Norris added 20,000 words to her short story. How well she did it is evidenced by the dozens of editions through which the book has run and more remarkably by the fact that Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, paid a high price for the privilege of running the novel as a serial after its publication as a book. This is apparently a unique instance.

Mother was followed by The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne, the story of a great-hearted woman who brought her fresh and honest ideals into the heart of a narrow Western city. Those who read it may excusably gasp to hear that it was written in six weeks on an order from the Woman’s Home Companion. Poor Dear Margaret Kirby, collected short stories, was the third book, appearing in the spring of 1913. The Treasure had had serial publication in the Saturday Evening Post. Saturday’s Child preceded it. And then Mrs. Norris made her first great success with a full length novel which many will consider the biggest book she has done. It was The Story of Julia Page, the first of three novels which have been called Mrs. Norris’s trilogy of American womanhood. The others are The Heart of Rachael and Martie, the Unconquered. Between these last two appeared her short novel, Undertow, dealing with two young married spendthrifts. Josselyn’s Wife, “the story of a woman’s faith,” tells of a sweet, simple girl, Ellen Latimer, transported by a whirlwind marriage to Gibbs Josselyn from the humdrum existence of a small country town to the luxuries of the wealthy social life of New York. There is a time when the young second wife of Gibbs Josselyn’s father threatens to break up the happiness of the younger Josselyn and Ellen, for Gibbs succumbs readily to her undeniable fascination. Then comes the crash. Through the long agony of a murder trial it is the wife he has neglected who alone upholds him. It is her faith that wins and that brings him at last to an understanding of his egotistical folly.

Mrs. Norris is not yet at the height and fullness of her powers, as well as can be judged contemporaneously. It is easy enough to look back on the completed work of a writer’s lifetime and say, “Here he reached his apex, here he began to decline, here he rose again for an hour.” But to estimate the present and relate it tentatively to the future is very much harder. Mother was one “peak” in the graph of Mrs. Norris’s progress, The Story of Julia Page was another and a higher, Josselyn’s Wife is at least as high. There is every prospect that in the active and happy years we may hope are ahead of her, Kathleen Norris will excel the impressive novels she has already given us.

Books by Kathleen Norris

Mother, 1911.
The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne, 1912.
Poor Dear Margaret Kirby, 1913.
Saturday’s Child, 1914.
The Treasure, 1915.
The Story of Julia Page, 1915.
The Heart of Rachael, 1916.
Undertow, 1917.
Martie, the Unconquered, 1917.
Josselyn’s Wife, 1918.
Sisters, 1919.
Harriet and the Piper, 1920.
The Beloved Woman, 1921.
Lucretia Lombard, 1922.
Certain People of Importance, 1922.

These novels by Mrs. Norris are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.

CHAPTER VII

MARGARET DELAND

“Which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills!” Beautiful simile!

In this old garden the little girl played the greater part of her waking hours. She loved the outdoors. She was highly impressionable and imaginative. She had the curious and dear convictions of childhood. She was sure that the whole of Asia was a yellow land, because the map of Asia in her old dog-eared geography was colored yellow.

Her first taste in reading was formed upon Ivanhoe and The Talisman and Tales of a Grandfather, Hawthorne’s stories, and the works of Washington Irving. Her first and indeed her final experience of life was that summed up in Stevenson’s saying: “And the greatest adventures are not those we go to seek.” Mrs. Deland expressed it this way: “Not the prominent events; nor the catastrophes, nor the very great pleasures; not the journeys nor the deprivations, but the commonplaces of everyday life determine what a child shall do, and still more positively determine what he shall be.”

In one word: character. And it is with character almost solely that Mrs. Deland as a writer has been preoccupied. Dr. Lavendar is a study in character, so is Helena Richie, so is the Iron Woman; and the young people that surround her are character studies of a completeness unexcelled in American fiction.

There is more than one way of dealing with character in fiction. But first we must settle what we mean by character. We mean, concisely, inherited traits as affected by environment. Environment includes people as well as things.

It is impossible to make a character study convincing without taking heredity into account, and this irrespective of whether heredity or environment plays the greater rôle in a mortal’s life. The eternal controversy as to which of these two influences is preponderant is largely futile because the preponderance differs with various persons, differs with the traits inherited, differs with a thousand differing pressures of circumstance. One thing is certain: whether anything is known about an individual’s inherited endowment or not we always and inescapably assume that he has one. The best handy illustration of this is Jennie Cushing in Mary S. Watts’s book, The Rise of Jennie Cushing. Nothing whatever is known by us regarding Jennie Cushing’s inheritance; we don’t know her parentage any more than she does. Her environment we know with awful exactitude and we are perfectly conscious that it fails utterly to explain her except, of course, her marvelous and painfully acquired gift of reticence. We are forced, therefore, to presuppose in her case an inheritance of extraordinary will-power and extraordinary sensitiveness to beauty in any of its forms. And we do presuppose it! It makes her wholly credible; more credible, probably, than any careful account of her forebears could have made her.

Now in The Iron Woman, indisputably Mrs. Deland’s finest story, we get both heredity and environment exactly known and precisely compounded. Indeed, if Mrs. Deland’s great novel has a fault it is the fault of giving us more knowledge than should be ours. Her people are so complete that there is no unknown quantity in the equation they make. It is just a trifle too good to be true, too life-like to be convincing. Knowing to the last inch what they are (as we know our neighbors of long standing) we know to the last degree what they will do, under what circumstances they will do it, how they will do it and what the result upon them and upon others, just as minutely known, will be. To see Sarah Maitland and the boy Blair is like watching a terrible and inevitable and perfectly anticipated tragedy approaching in the house next door. Listen:

“But after a breathless six months of partnership—in business, if in nothing else—Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little two-year-old Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he was ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed him that there was nothing for him to do but die—so that there might be room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody who saw her in those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration, but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under like circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as Mrs. Maitland’s religion had never been more than church-going and contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very likely she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not feel anything else. Not even her baby’s little clinging hands, or his milky lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a reliable woman to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naïve conviction of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous, she began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever since it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited trousseau, she sat in a front pew, between the two children, and felt that she was doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty without maternal instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal instinct without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few years of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to have nothing but duty to offer to her child. Nannie’s puzzles began then. ‘Why don’t Mamma hug my baby brother?’ she used to ask the nurse, who had no explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie, and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his service while he was still in petticoats.

“Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland’s maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by the boy’s shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first expressions of opinion had been contained in the single word ‘uggy,’ accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed—and she was one of those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a sneeze—Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, ‘No, no! No, no!’ at which she would push him roughly from her knee and fall into hurt silence.... She took Blair’s little chin in her hand—a big, beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails—and turning his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. ‘Get over your airs!’ she said.”

It is, we repeat, exactly like living next door to the family and, with the procession of the years, collecting innumerable little incidents and observed facts all piecing accurately together. It is not fiction at all, it is biography, the best and brightest and most instructive kind of biography. What is the difference between fiction and biography? Principally it consists only in this, that in the case of the life of an actual man the biographer is under no necessity of explaining or reconciling his apparent contradictions. We know the man lived and that he was capable of those contradictions. If the biographer can reconcile or explain them, offering an acceptable and plausible theory to account for them, very well; we are grateful. But it is not imperative that he should do so; what is imperative is that he should set down a faithful record of the contradictions themselves; for we can then, having the evidence before us, frame our own theories to account for them.

In writing fiction or fictional biography the author’s main struggle is for plausibility. If his character does perplexing and contradictory things the author feels that he must make them entirely understandable or we will not accept the character—and in this he is generally right. Human nature is human nature; what we take at the hands of life we are forced to take and make the best of; but we won’t take the same things from a novel because we aren’t compelled to. We insist that the novelist make everything clear and under this great compulsion the novelist is always working. The result is not always happy. Compulsions, however desirable in general, remain laws of force. Compulsory education—compulsory fiction; there are cases where both work badly, where both do serious ill.

Considered as fiction, The Iron Woman is vitiated ever so slightly by the painful consciousness that we have required every person in it to be explained to us too fully, a requirement to which Mrs. Deland has obediently conformed. No mystery, no magic of the unknown, invests the story. We have only to watch these people take their appointed courses to an appointed end. We read eagerly and with a sense of uncertainty not as to what the outcome will be, but as to whether Mrs. Deland will dare, will dare, to break the law of the fictioneer. She does not, and thereby throws her book over into the field of biography. What, you say, did these people actually live? Of course they lived. If you mean, were there originals for all of them? we cannot say. Probably there were. But you must remember that the novelist who works from an original, a living person, hardly ever takes that person as he is. Usually some addition and subtraction goes on. Without doubt this was the case here. When we speak of The Iron Woman as biography, the best and brightest of biography, we mean simply this: The studies of the people in it are too minute for fiction and the people themselves are over-plausible. The writer’s effort to make them plausible has gone so far and been so successful as to defeat her end. The wealth of detail with which she enriches her splendid story makes it a biography, or a cluster of biographies; and considered as biographies, these people are a vivid success, and all that extreme plausibility we have noted, all that conscientious dove-tailing of traits and circumstance, falls lightly and easily and beautifully into place as the brilliant and convincing effort of a biographer to explain her people, reconcile their self-contradictions, put them in the right light before the world, in the light in which they saw themselves and in which they saw each other.

We are not trying to be ingenious nor to find in Mrs. Deland’s work something which is not there. We have no patience with artificiality in dealing with these matters. We are simply trying to account for the feeling that sweeps over us as we re-read The Iron Woman, a feeling which we believe most of those who re-read the book will share. And we venture to think that in this attempt to solve our feeling about Mrs. Deland’s biggest novel we have solved the peculiarity of all her exquisite work. She is the ideal biographer. As supporting evidence to the case we have made (we hope it is a decent case) we call attention to her Old Chester books and stories. In The Awakening of Helena Richie, in Old Chester Tales, in Dr. Lavendar’s People—in them all, in all her work—we believe that the reader who takes the biographical standpoint will find the fullest satisfaction. It will be a full satisfaction indeed. Mrs. Deland is one of the ablest writers America has produced so far. We will allow her to be a genius if genius is, after all, merely the capacity for taking infinite pains and exhibiting an infinite comprehension of and sympathy with simple and memorable lives.

Books by Margaret Deland

Good for the Soul.
The Rising Tide.
R. J.’s Mother.
The Way to Peace.
Where the Laborers Are Few.
John Ward, Preacher.
The Old Garden and Other Verses.
Philip and His Wife.
Florida Days.
Sidney.
The Story of a Child.
The Wisdom of Fools.
Mr. Tommy Dove and Other Stories.
Old Chester Tales.
Dr. Lavendar’s People.
The Common Way, 1904.
The Awakening of Helena Richie, 1906.
An Encore, 1907.
The Iron Woman, 1911.
The Voice, 1912.
Partners, 1913.
The Hands of Esau, 1914.
Around Old Chester, 1915.
Small Things, 1919.
The Vehement Flame, 1922.

Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; Small Things is published by D. Appleton & Company, New York.

CHAPTER VIII

GENE STRATTON-PORTER

If Mrs. Porter has egoism it is the sort of egoism that the world needs. It is nothing more or less than a firm and sustaining belief in one’s self, in the worth of one’s work, and is bred of a passionate conviction that you must always give the best of yourself without stint. Is it egoistical to believe that? Is it self-centeredness to be proud of that? Is it wrong, having set the world the best example of which you are capable, to call it to the world’s attention? You will not get the present reporter to say so! You will get from him nothing but an expression of his own conviction that while literature, æsthetically viewed, may not have been enriched by Mrs. Porter’s writings, thousands, yes, tens of thousands of men and women have been made happier and better by her stories. And that just about sweeps any other possible accomplishment into limbo!

The secret of Mrs. Porter’s success is sincerity, complete sincerity; doing one’s best work and doing it to the top of one’s bent. It is not a question of art. There is no art about it. The finest literary artist in the world could not duplicate her performance unless he were a duplicate of her. It’s not a literary matter at all; the thing has its roots in the personality, in the mind and heart and nervous organization of the writer. If you could be a Gene Stratton-Porter you could write the novels she writes and achieve just the success she achieves, a success which is improperly measured by earnings of $500,000 to $750,000 from her books, a success of which the true measure can never be taken because it is a success in human lives and not in dollars.

The best evidence of this—for there will be doubters—is the story of her life, very largely told in her own words, published in a booklet by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1915. The booklet, for some time to be had on request, is now out of print. In what follows it is drawn upon freely and almost to the exclusion of anything else.

“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.’”

There were twelve children. Mrs. Stratton was “a wonderful mother.” She kept an immaculate house, set a famous table, hospitably received all who came to her door, made her children’s clothing. Her great gift was making things grow. “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!”

She was of Dutch extraction and “worked her special magic with bulbs, which she favored 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 at 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.’”

Mark Stratton was of English blood, a descendant of that first Mark Stratton of New York, who married the beauty, Anne Hutchinson. He was of the English family of which the Earl of Northbrooke is the present head. He was tenacious, had clear-cut ideas, could not be influenced against his better judgment. “He believed in God, in courtesy, in honor, 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, Macaulay, 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.” The Bible he knew by heart, except for the Old Testament pedigrees. This is a literal statement of fact. He traveled miles to deliver sermons, lectures, talks. He worshiped humanity and all outdoors. Color was a prime delight. “‘He had a streak of genius in his makeup, the genius of large appreciation,’” says Mrs. Porter. He reveled in descriptions of personal bravery.

“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,” on a farm in Wabash county, Indiana, in 1868. “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.”

The farm was called “Hopewell,” after the home of some of Mark Stratton’s ancestors. Mark Stratton and his wife had spent twenty-five years beautifying it. The land was rolling, with springs and streams and plenty of remaining forest. The roads were smooth, 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.”

The girl had an invalid mother, for about the time when Gene could first remember things Mrs. Stratton contracted typhoid after nursing three of her children through it. She never recovered her health. The youngest child was therefore allowed to follow her father and brothers 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 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.

“‘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.... I fed butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen of a cellar window, 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.’”

At school Mrs. Porter hated mathematics. Once when a mathematical topic for an essay was forced upon her, she broke loose and read the class a review of Saintine’s Picciola, the story of an imprisoned nobleman and a tiny flower that blossomed within prison walls. She fascinated her audience.

“‘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.’” Her father encouraged her in writing, and when she wanted to do something in color had an easel built for her. On it she afterward painted the water colors for Moths of the Limberlost. If she wanted to try music he paid for lessons for her. “‘It was he who demanded a physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigors of scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten books in five 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 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.’”

In 1886, at eighteen, Gene Stratton was married to Charles Darwin Porter. A daughter was born to them, but the fever to write was merely in abeyance for a while. “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.”

She explains: “‘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 sink, I was rather put to it when it came to giving an exhibition.’ ...

“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 $1,000 worth of equipment at the end of the first year. The second year she increased this by $500, and then accepted a place on the natural history staff of Outing, working closely with Mr. Caspar 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.”

She dreaded failure, she who had been bred to believe that failure was disgraceful. “‘I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in the 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 in May; in September the storekeeper congratulated her on her story in the Metropolitan. She had not seen it. She wrote to the editor and got a quick reply. An office boy had lost or destroyed her address and he had been waiting to hear from her. Would she do a Christmas story?

She would, and did, and he asked for illustrations. She found that his time limit gave her one day to do them in. She worked from 8 A. M. to 4 A. M. to make the necessary photographs, which required special settings and costuming.

Not long after, Mrs. Porter wrote a short story of 10,000 words and sent it to the Century. Richard Watson Gilder advised her to make a book of it. This is the origin of The Song of the Cardinal. “Following Mr. Gilder’s advice, she recast the tale and, starting with the mangled body of a cardinal some marksman had left in the road she was traveling, in a fervor of love for the birds and indignation at the hunter she told the cardinal’s life history.” The book was published in 1903.

She illustrated the book herself after dangers and hardships of which the reader seldom has any conception. Securing a mere tailpiece picture once cost her three weeks in bed where she lay twisted in convulsions and insensible most of the time.

Freckles appeared in the fall of 1904. She had been spending every other day for three months in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of studies of the nest of a black vulture. She combined two men to make McLean of the story, but Sarah Duncan was a real woman; Freckles was a composite of certain ideals and her own field experiences, merged with those of a friend. For the Angel she idealized her own daughter. The book is dedicated to her husband, because he helped make it possible. She had promised him not to work in the Limberlost. “‘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.’” Nevertheless lumbermen had brought word of the vulture’s nest. “‘I hastened to tell my husband the wonderful story of the big black bird, the downy white baby, the pale blue egg.’” So he said he would go with her.

It was awful.

“‘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 pulling and prying 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 odors 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.’”

The story itself—Freckles—originated in 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. It was an eagle’s, but Mrs. Porter had been doing vultures, so a vulture’s it became.

Freckles took three years to find its audience. The marginal illustrations made people think it purely a nature book. The news that it was a novel of the kind you simply must read had to get about by word of mouth. The copy that lies beside us as we write this sketch was printed in 1914, ten years after the story’s first appearance. The jacket says that by 1914 exactly 670,733 copies had been sold. And the most important three of the ten years were largely wasted!

Publishers told Mrs. Porter then and afterward, repeatedly and emphatically, that if she wanted to sell her best and make the most money she must cut out the nature stuff. But, as she says, her real reason in writing her novels was to bring natural history attractively before the people who wouldn’t touch it in its pure state.

“‘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 $600 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, honor, 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.’”

A Girl of the Limberlost “‘comes fairly close to my idea of a good book. 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.’”

Prior to the appearance of A Daughter of the Land this was Mrs. Porter’s best book, unquestionably. All she says about it is perfectly true, but she does not give herself proper credit in respect of one or two of the book’s qualities. There is much humor in it and the delineation of Kate Comstock, particularly in the first half of the book, has the sharpness of line and the sureness of handling visible in a fine etching. Consciously or subconsciously Mrs. Porter created at the very outset of her story, in the second chapter, a situation which appeals to the most thrilling and satisfying instinct in the human breast. Elnora, pitifully dressed, has spent a humiliating first day at high school in town. Since her mother will not provide them, Margaret and Wesley Sinton go forth at nightfall to buy the clothes the girl needs to wear and sit up half the night to get them ready quickly. It is both humorous and genuinely moving. The reader shares their burst of generosity. He shops with them and sits up with them and worries with them and rejoices and partakes of their happiness in “doing for” the girl; he is all the while quite conscious of the humor of the situation without any abatement of the tenderness and delight that is his as well as theirs. This is great work; it may not be great literature; whether it is or not depends on what you require “literature” to give you. The innumerable readers who require literature to give them what life gives them (or even more, what life unjustly withholds from them)—emotion, pure, deep, contenting and cleansing—these will ask no more than Mrs. Porter gives them here.

The idea of The Harvester was suggested to Mrs. Porter by an editor who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it, about ginseng diggers. As she looked into the raising of the drug, the idea came to her of a man growing drug plants professionally and of a sick girl healed by them. “‘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.... 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 had always 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.’”

Laddie—“‘Of a truth, the home I described in this book I know 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.... 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.’”

Mrs. Porter does not put money first, nor anywhere near first. “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 her 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.” No argument is possible. Mrs. Porter has spent a great deal of the small fortunes her novels have brought her on nature books which represent years of fieldwork and a staggering expenditure for scientific materials.

This is Mrs. Porter’s own description of the Limberlost swamp where she has done so much work and which she has made yield such good stories.

“‘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 those 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 a 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 plowed 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 my 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.’”

This promise Mrs. Porter has kept in her latest novel, A Daughter of the Land, the story of Kate Bates, an American through and through, who fought for her freedom against long odds, renouncing the easy path of luxury that leads to loss of self-respect. It is Mrs. Porter’s finest novel, this story of a woman’s life from her teens to well past forty, from school days to her second marriage. It is a much more ambitious attempt than any of her other stories and as successful as it is big.

Shamelessly we have built this chapter almost entirely upon Mrs. Porter’s own account of herself—but could any one do better than to present that? We are confident he could not. And aside from what she has to say of her stories they call for no special survey one by one. The one supremely significant thing to grasp is her sincerity and her giving of the best that is in her. Now, the mass of people possess, in respect of these qualities in a writer, a sort of sixth sense, a perfectly infallible instinct that tells them when a writer is sincere, when he is giving of his best. It is the faculty aptly described in the phrase: “I don’t know much about literature, but I know what I like.” To be sure you do! And that’s as near as ready characterization can come to the secret! The person who has achieved a certain measure of sophistication or who has cultivated his taste (which may mean improving it but always means narrowing it) does not know what he likes! He knows only what he doesn’t like—or at least he is always finding it. He pays the price of every refiner in the loss of broad and basic satisfaction. Cultivate a tongue for caviar and you lose the honest and healthful enjoyment of corned beef and cabbage. When you appreciate Bach you can no longer get thrilling pleasure hearing a military band. It’s the same way everywhere and with everybody.

If some people find no pleasure or benefit in Gene Stratton-Porter’s stories, that is exclusively their own fault. They are looking for certain æsthetic satisfactions in what they read and they require them so absolutely that the writer’s best and the writer’s sincerity cannot compensate for their absence. Is it good to have come to such a state? Every one must make up his own mind about that, even as he must make his own decision whether he will strive to attain it. Everything of this sort is to be had for a price,—if you want to pay so much.

“‘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.’”

Thus Gene Stratton-Porter. There is incontestable evidence that her books have done these very things. Literature, we have been told, is “a criticism of life.” How about molding lives?

Books by Gene Stratton-porter

The Song of the Cardinal, 1903.
Freckles, 1904.
What I Have Done With Birds [Friends in Feathers], 1907.
At the Foot of the Rainbow, 1908.
A Girl of the Limberlost, 1909.
Birds of the Bible, 1909.
Music of the Wild, 1910.
The Harvester, 1911.
Moths of the Limberlost, 1912.
Laddie, 1913.
Michael O’Halloran, 1915.
Morning Face.
A Daughter of the Land, 1918.
Homing with the Birds, 1920.
Her Father’s Daughter, 1921.
The Fire Bird, 1922.

Mrs. Porter’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.

CHAPTER IX

ELEANOR H. PORTER

She tells us that she works here every morning when too boisterous winds or a driving storm do not make it impossible; or too low a temperature. She writes novels. It takes her a year to do one and when she has finished she is good for nothing for several days. She writes each book three times; first in lead pencil, the second draft on the typewriter here, “and it is this copy that is polished over and rewritten and tinkered with—and all fixed up.” The third draft has usually few changes. It, or a stenographer’s copy of it, goes to the publisher, and later there comes a message from Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston:

“Advance orders for your new novel Just David are 100,000 copies.”

Isn’t that rewarding? Just David will be out in a few days now....

The author of Just David—and The Road to Understanding and Oh, Money! Money! and, why of course of Pollyanna!—is not thinking of the royalties that will be hers on 100,000 copies of her novel. No. Eleanor H. Porter makes a moderate fortune with each of her books. But what rewards her for the task of writing them—did you ever sit down and write, just write, 80,000 words, let alone telling a story?—what gives her the satisfaction that’s of the heart is the invincible proof that a hundred thousand are buying her book on faith. They believe in her, in her work; she has pleased them, made them happier or better somehow, somewhere, somewhen; they look to her for help, for cheer, for entertainment, for a kind of enlightenment that they haven’t found elsewhere and that will be supremely worth their while.

Stand aside, you who are sophisticated, cynical, world worn and merely flippant! If you could see assembled before you in one vast throng this hundred thousand and tens of thousands more, if you could see them gathered about you with upturned interested, expectant and eager faces, what would you say? What could you say? Do you think your sophistication would be proof against the expression on these faces? Do you think that you could give them what they need? Would your subtleties help them? Would they listen to you and go away a little braver, a little more comforted, a little readier to face life?

Up in the White Mountains there’s a cabin called after the girl Pollyanna. Out in Colorado there’s a Pollyanna teahouse. A little maid in Texas bears the name. The builder of an apartment house in an Indiana city has his fancy struck. There’s a Pollyanna brand of milk, and Pollyanna clubs are formed whose members sport an enameled button showing a young girl’s sweet face. Surely the woman who can so touch the hearts, the imagination, or even merely the fancy of men and women and children everywhere—surely she and her work call for respectful consideration. There must be something here, something admirable, if we can only put our fingers on it! There is.

And first let us hear about Mrs. Porter herself. We have met her at work. Was there anything to suggest direct descent from Governor William Bradford of the Mayflower and the “stern and rockbound coast”? There was not. There was, however, a suggestion of a childhood spent in an oldtime white frame New England house, with green blinds and big pillars in front. There was certainly more than a suggestion of a child brought up to play indoors and out. With a little imagination we could have seen her studying music, always music, loving to improvise. “I liked to play out all my moods and everything I saw and heard. I could get rid of my tempers, too, by sometimes just playing them out. And I liked to play the beautiful things I saw—sunsets, woods and lakes.... In that way, perhaps, David is autobiographical.... The many years’ training in voice as well as instrumental music has never failed to help me in expressing just the mood I want to express.”

She was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, a place of some few thousands in the White Mountains, the daughter of Francis H. Hodgman and Llewella Woolson Hodgman. She had a brother to play with. She “knew the woods from early childhood.” Little verses and stories by her commemorated birthdays and other occasions of moment. In high school ill health arrested her studies. For a while books had to be put entirely aside and she lived a good deal outdoors. Spruce, fir, cedar and tamarack, mountain flowers and plants, became personalities to be distinguished one from another and to be delighted in for their peculiarities. When she wrote Just David she had only to recall her youth, after all.

Health regained, she went to Boston for more musical study under private teachers and at the New England Conservatory. She sang in concerts and in church choirs. In 1892 she was married to John Lyman Porter. She lived a year in Chattanooga and a few years in New York and Springfield, Vermont; Boston (Cambridge) has been her home with these exceptions. Mr. and Mrs. Porter have lived in Cambridge for the last sixteen years. Mrs. Porter’s mother, Mrs. Hodgman, an invalid, has lived with them.

We have said that Mrs. Porter works every morning. Yes, the morning hours are set apart for her work and it is not readily interrupted. Her first book, published in 1907, was Cross Currents, a study of child labor, struck out from her by what she had seen in New York of youngsters made to toil at the fashioning of artificial flowers. Indeed, her first impulse to write came to her in New York, on an afternoon several years after her marriage, as she stood in Trinity churchyard. It was a flash, a dramatic impression such as comes to many a visitor. When these dead awaken! If these dead were to awaken, were to come back to us here and now! How would they think and feel about what they would see? What would they say and do?

Well—

“So that was how I got my start.” True enough, for the real start comes in the impulse, doesn’t it? After that has been felt intervals hardly matter....

Cross Currents was successful and Mrs. Porter was persuaded to write a sequel, The Turn of the Tide. She had developed a habit, now fixed, of clipping from newspapers and magazines bits of news, comments, whatnot, that were significant to her. These she filed, filed and card indexed. One day she saw in some magazine four lines expressing wonder as to what would happen, if feminine influence came into the home life of three bachelors.

From those four lines, or rather, from the idea in them, came Miss Billy; and from Miss Billy came Miss Billy’s Decision and Miss Billy—Married. Not immediately; Mrs. Porter filed the clipping. She thought vaguely that perhaps, maybe, some day, she would write a short story—only a short story—based on the idea in this sentence or so....

Pollyanna—

So many think of Mrs. Porter only as the author of Pollyanna—they are not her real readers who know better!—that it is much fairer to her and ourselves to consider her other books. After the Pollyanna stories came Just David, easily accounted for. Mrs. Porter says that her thoughts had often played around the idea of a child brought up to know only what is good. You shudder, or laugh. Good heavens, don’t you wish that you could have been spared some of the things you were brought up to know? At the bottom of your acquired attitude is there no faint wistfulness, no trace of longing for something once loved and lost—not awhile but forever?

David is the only son of a violinist. After his mother’s death the father carries the boy to a cabin in the mountains. Six years afterward he is brought to a quiet country town—a lad in love with music, with birds and flowers.

“Mr. and Mrs. Holly, more than ever now, were learning to look at the world through David’s eyes. One day—one wonderful day—they went to walk in the woods with the boy; and whenever before had Simon Holly left his work for so frivolous a thing as to walk in the woods!

“It was not accomplished without a struggle, as David could have told. All the morning David urged and begged. If for once, just once, they would leave everything and come, they would not regret it, he was sure. But they shook their heads and said, ‘No, no, impossible.’ In the afternoon the pies were done and the potatoes dug and David urged and pleaded again. And to please the boy they went.

“It was a curious walk. Ellen Holly trod softly with timid feet. She threw hurried, frightened glances from side to side. It was plain that Ellen Holly did not know how to play. Simon Holly stalked at her elbow, stern, silent and preoccupied. It was plain that Simon Holly not only did not know how to play, but did not care to find out.

“The boy tripped along ahead and talked. He had the air of a monarch displaying his kingdom. Here was a flower that was like a story for interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth telling. Even Simon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch; and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly’s murmured, ‘But, David, where is the difference? They look so much alike,’ had said:

“‘Oh, but they are not. Just see how much more pointed at the top this fir is than that spruce back there; and the branches grow straight out, too, like arms, and they are all smooth and tapering at the end like a pussy-cat’s tail. But the spruce back there—its branches turned down and out—didn’t you notice?—and they are all bushy at the end like a squirrel’s tail. Oh, they’re lots different.

“‘That’s a larch way ahead—that one with the branches all scraggly and close down to the ground. I could start to climb that easy, but I couldn’t that pine over there. See, it’s way up before there is a place for your feet! But I love pines. Up there on the mountain, where I lived, the pines were so tall that it seemed as if God used them sometimes to hold up the sky.’

“And Simon Holly heard, and said nothing, and that he did say nothing—especially nothing in answer to David’s confident assertions concerning celestial and terrestrial architecture—only goes to show how well, indeed, the man was learning to look at the world through David’s eyes....”

“If the characters are true, the story tells itself,” says Mrs. Porter. “The plot comes very easily after I get some leading idea which I wish to work out. It is sometimes months after I have something in mind before I have carried the idea along far enough to begin writing. The ideas for novels come from careful observation and wide reading.

“No, I would not say that novels are written by inspiration. I call it enthusiasm. And unless the writer has enthusiasm while writing a novel I think the indifference is bound to show in the story.”

Her own enthusiasm holds her to the task, carries her through the year she devotes to a book, enables her sometimes to write steadily for eight or nine hours and then spend an evening with her heavy correspondence. Her enthusiasm, a steady flame, burns to the end; and then her exhaustion does not matter. The task is done.

Without an idea—a crisp, definite, interesting idea is always there, whether you like her novels or no—without an idea Mrs. Porter won’t write. But when she begins to write she has much more than the idea. She has a synopsis written out. She couldn’t work without one, she says. And to that synopsis she sticks pretty closely. “For I must see my aim,” she explains, “I must have every part of the story bear definitely toward the object. The synopsis of Pollyanna differs very little from the completed story. However, the glad game was not in the synopsis. That did invent itself—in the second chapter. And of course various characters always have a way of sort of writing themselves in, and new scenes and incidents suggest themselves as the book grows.”

Does Mrs. Porter preach? Not by intention. She abhors the notion of trying to. She does believe that “the idea of happiness should be held up to people. But I do not attempt to preach happiness,” she adds hastily. “I make my characters as simple and natural as possible. If the characters are sufficiently vivid, if they are true, they can say a lot of things that no author could say directly without being charged with sermonizing.”

Oho! remarks the critic, Mrs. Porter thinks that if she puts her preaching into the mouths of her persons she can escape the charge of sermonizing. Wrong. Mrs. Porter does not say that. She does declare that if the characters are true they can say things that, from the author, would be mere preaching. Truth in your people comes first, must always be first; if they are true they can, and probably will, not only say but do many things with a moral in them. Why, aren’t we always reading a moral out of—or into—every other thing we hear our neighbors say or see them do?

The critic has another quarrel with Eleanor Porter. He accuses her of “evasive idealism” and “sham optimism” in her stories. Let her answer him:

“Just why the ‘realities of life’ should always mean the filth and brambles, sticks and stones and stumbling blocks of our daily pathway I have never understood,” she cries. “But such seems to be the case. To most critics there are evidently no pleasantly agreeable, decent qualities of life. But I believe that there are, and these realities may lend themselves to just as sincere and direct an interpretation of life as may the other kind.

“There is a blue sky, there is a warm sun, and there are birds that sing in the treetops. Then why should their presence be unnoticed—sometimes? That is certainly not a sugary philosophy utterly without a basis in logic or human experience. I realize that this sort of thing can be overdone, but still contend that always to look at the hole instead of the doughnut is not only very foolish—but very detrimental to one’s digestion.”

Bravo! A simple, straightforward and unstudied rejoinder, that! And if the critic says that he is only asking for “both realities” let us demand of him why he praised the “artistry” of those dark Russian novels of muck and insanity—and nothing else. He must condemn them for their worse one-sidedness ere we listen to another word from him. Moreover, we have, we must confess, whatever our personal tastes in fiction, always enough and too many of the specialists in gloom; never quite enough of the purveyors of cheerfulness.

You may feel a possibly irrational prejudice against the child that cheers, as Pollyanna or David, but if you do not find absorbing the situation in a “grown-up” novel like The Road to Understanding it is your fault, not Eleanor Porter’s. Here is the son of a very rich man who has always had his way and so takes it headlong in the matter of marrying his aunt’s nursegirl. She is not fitted to make him happy. They are separated—never mind how. The husband thinks of it as a “vacation” for his wife and the baby girl and has no idea that the breach may be semi-permanent. The wife makes it so. She goes to a friend of her husband and begs him to enable her to become in education, in tastes, in deportment fit to be Burke Denby’s wife. And she persuades him to it. Her whereabouts, the whereabouts of herself and Burke Denby’s little daughter, is so simply and effectually concealed, that the husband never gets trace of them. What Helen Denby has set out to do is rather impossible as regards herself, she acknowledges that; but with the passage of years and constant association with well-bred people she does very largely acquire the things she lacked. Yes, years! It is an idea and it is certainly a situation. This is no place to give away a denouement but—they are brought together again.

An idea just as ingenious is the foundation of Mrs. Porter’s amusing Oh, Money! Money! It is the attempt of Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, possessor of twenty millions of dollars, to find out how some of his heirs will spend money after he is dead. They are three distant cousins and each of them receives a trustee’s check for $100,000. Then plain John Smith appears among them and watches results. He also learns a thing or two and finds a wife in a woman of middle age (or more) whose humorous wisdom is aptly summed up by her remark that “if you don’t know how to get happiness out of five dollars, you won’t know how to get it out of five thousand. For it isn’t the money that does things; it’s the man behind the money.”

Sell? Of course books like this sell! You don’t have to be a psychologist to grasp and subscribe to the six reasons for a big sale, advanced by the publishers just before the publication of Oh, Money! Money!—six reasons whose validity has been sufficiently proved as these lines are being written, with proofs piling up hour by hour. Here they are:

1. It deals with the most interesting subject in the world—the getting and spending of money.

2. The story of three families—cousins—who unexpectedly receive $100,000 each from an unknown relative, will strike a responsive chord, in every reader’s heart and set every reader thinking how he would spend the money.

3. It has the same quality that has made Cinderella the most popular of all fairy tales, the joy of watching a girl who has never been fairly treated come out on top in spite of all odds.

4. The scene is laid in a little village and the whole book is a gem of country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy.

5. There is a charming love theme with a happy ending.

6. And, above all, the story teaches an unobtrusive lesson that will appeal to every one of Mrs. Porter’s readers; the lesson that happiness must come from within, and that money cannot buy it.

. . . . . .

Eleanor Hodgman Porter died on May 21, 1920.

BOOKS BY ELEANOR H. PORTER

Cross Currents, 1907.
The Turn of the Tide, 1908.
The Story of Marco, 1911.
Miss Billy, 1911.
Miss Billy’s Decision, 1912.
Pollyanna, 1913.
Miss Billy—Married, 1914.
Pollyanna Grows Up, 1915.
Just David, 1916.
The Road to Understanding, 1917.
Oh, Money! Money! 1918.
Dawn, 1919.
Mary-Marie, 1919.
Sister Sue, 1921.