d 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 ex