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, honour, 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."

In 1906, having seen a few of Mrs. Porter's studies of bird life, Mr.
Edward Bok telegraphed the author asking to meet him in Chicago. She
had a big portfolio of fine prints from plates for which she had gone
to the last extremity of painstaking care, and the result was an order
from Mr. Bok for a six months' series in the Ladies' Home Journal of
the author's best bird studies accompanied by descriptions of how she
secured them. This material was later put in book form under the title,
"What I Have Done with Birds," and is regarded as authoritative on the
subject of bird photography and bird life, for in truth it covers every
phase of the life of the birds described, and contains much of other
nature subjects.

By this time Mrs. Porter had made a contract with her publishers to
alternate her books. She agreed to do a nature book for love, and the