In the nature of this child 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