At the Foot of the Rainbow | Page 8

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