GENE STRATTON-PORTER
Because Gene Stratton-Porter cares for the truth that is in her, she is
the most widely read and most widely loved author in America to-day,
with the probable exception of Harold Bell Wright. She is absolutely
sincere in all her work, she is in dead earnest, she does not care
primarily for money, but for certain ideas and ideals. Let no one
underestimate the tremendous power that is hers because of these things,
let no one underestimate her hold upon millions of readers; let none
undervalue the influence she has exerted and continues to exert, an
influence always for good, for clean living, for manly men, for womanly
women, for love of nature, for sane and reasonable human hopes and
aspirations, for honest affection, for wholesome laughter, for a healthy
emotionalism as the basis and justification of humble and invaluable
lives.
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._