g 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 the days of struggle he stood fast; firm in his belief in me.
He was half the battle. It was he who