ever amount to?" Their faces betrayed their own conviction that she
would amount to nothing. She tried piano but concluded that the training
necessary to make her a teacher would take too long and took up
stenography. After a few weeks she decided that she was unfitted for the
work and would rather be a nurse. Some weeks were spent at home just
thinking about it, then she began her training. At the end of the period
of probation she left--she knew she could never be a nurse. She spent
the days reading, sewing a little, taking pictures in the woods and
along the shore near her home and tinting them. She drifted through the
months, through a year. One day she posed a group of children, watched
her chance and caught them all unconscious and natural, interested in
their pails and shovels and the tunnel she had helped to dig. The
mothers of the children saw the picture. Beautifully tinted it seemed
alive and they were enthusiastic. The next week she chanced to see a
nine year old fishing with a child's faith. The perfect stillness of
the usually active little body, the expectant look on the small face
charmed her and in a moment, her camera had them. Every one who saw the
picture exclaimed at its naturalness and life and a friend who believed
she saw a future for the girl took it to the best photographer in the
city. That night the photographer's call anchored the drifting girl. He
made her feel that he had discovered an artist for which the city and
many outside of it had been waiting. He fired her imagination and
awakened her ambition. She felt that she had a real mission in
reproducing all the sweet simplicity and naturalness of the child. She
worked hard, the artistic temperament became trained and both fame and
money came to the girl who would probably still have been drifting had
not some one helped her find her work.

To criticize the drifting girl, even though she sorely tempts one to
criticism of her, is not enough. To preach to her on the evil of