began to accept what she sent them with little if any changes.
She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to
Recreation, and with the first installment was asked to take
charge of the department and furnish material each month for
which she was to be paid at current prices in high-grade
photographic material. We can form some idea of the work she did
under this arrangement from the fact that she had over one
thousand dollars' worth of equipment at the end of the first
year. The second year she increased this by five hundred, and
then accepted a place on the natural history staff of Outing,
working closely with Mr. Casper Whitney. After a year of this
helpful experience Mrs. Porter began to turn her attention to
what she calls "nature studies sugar coated with fiction." Mixing
some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-up fiction, she
wrote a little story entitled "Laddie, the Princess, and the
Pie."

"I was abnormally sensitive," says the author, "about trying to
accomplish any given thing and failing. I had been taught in my
home that it was black disgrace to undertake anything and fail.
My husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines,
and it was not possible to conduct departments in any of them and
not have it known; but only a few people in our locality read
these publications, none of them were interested in nature
photography, or natural science, so what I was trying to do was
not realized even by my own family.

"With them I was much more timid than with the neighbours. Least
of all did I want to fail before my man Person and my daughter
and our respective families; so I worked in secret, sent in my