At the Foot of the Rainbow | Page 9

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