used bird pictures and natural history sketches, quite an
innovation for a magazine at that time. With this encouragement
she wrote and illustrated a short story of about ten thousand
words, and sent it to the Century. Richard Watson Gilder advised
Mrs. Porter to enlarge it to book size, which she did. This book
is "The Cardinal." Following Mr. Gilder's advice, she recast the
tale and, starting with the mangled body of a cardinal some
marksman had left in the road she was travelling, in a fervour of
love for the birds and indignation at the hunter, she told the
Cardinal's life history in these pages.

The story was promptly accepted and the book was published with
very beautiful half-tones, and cardinal buckram cover.
Incidentally, neither the author's husband nor daughter had the
slightest idea she was attempting to write a book until work had
progressed to that stage where she could not make a legal
contract without her husband's signature. During the ten years of
its life this book has gone through eight different editions,
varying in form and make-up from the birds in exquisite colour,
as colour work advanced and became feasible, to a binding of
beautiful red morocco, a number of editions of differing design
intervening. One was tried in gray binding, the colour of the
female cardinal, with the red male used as an inset. Another was
woodsgreen with the red male, and another red with a wild rose
design stamped in. There is a British edition published by Hodder
and Stoughton. All of these had the author's own illustrations
which authorities agree are the most complete studies of the home
life and relations of a pair of birds ever published.

The story of these illustrations in "The Cardinal" and how the