owly toward its end, stopping its leisurely course for
bird, flower, lichen face, blue sky, perfumed wind, and the closest
intimacies of the daily life of common folk. Ten years have wrought a
great change in the sentiment against nature work and the interest in
it. Thousands who then looked upon the world with unobserving eyes are
now straining every nerve to accumulate enough to be able to end life
where they may have bird, flower, and tree for daily companions.

Mrs. Porter's account of the advice she received at this time is
particularly interesting. Three editors who read "Freckles" before it
was published offered to produce it, but all of them expressed
precisely the same opinion: "The book will never sell well as it is. If
you want to live from the proceeds of your work, if you want to sell
even moderately, you must CUT OUT THE NATURE STUFF." "Now to PUT IN THE
NATURE STUFF," continues the author, "was the express purpose for which
the book had been written. 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 six hundred dollars 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