hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and
linnets, and cooked and washed dishes besides three times a day.
In my spare time (mark the word, there was time to spare else the
books never would have been written and the pictures made) I
mastered photography to such a degree that the manufacturers of
one of our finest brands of print paper once sent the manager of
their factory to me to learn how I handled it. He frankly said
that they could obtain no such results with it as I did. He
wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia, and have me
tell him exactly how I worked. As I was using the family bathroom
for a darkroom and washing negatives and prints on turkey
platters in the kitchen, I was rather put to it when it came to
giving an exhibition. It was scarcely my fault if men could not
handle the paper they manufactured so that it produced the
results that I obtained, so I said I thought the difference might
lie in the chemical properties of the water, and sent this man on
his way satisfied. Possibly it did. But I have a shrewd suspicion
it lay in high-grade plates, a careful exposure, judicious
development, with self-compounded chemicals straight from the
factory, and C.P. I think plates swabbed with wet cotton before
development, intensified if of short exposure, and thoroughly
swabbed again before drying, had much to do with it; and paper
handled in the same painstaking manner had more. I have hundreds
of negatives in my closet made twelve years ago, in perfect
condition for printing from to-day, and I never have lost a plate
through fog from imperfect development and hasty washing; so my
little mother's rule of `whatsoever thy hands find to do, do it
with thy might,' held good in photography."

Thus had Mrs. Porter made time to study and to write, and editors