At the Foot of the Rainbow | Page 6

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