There are two obvious sources of interest in reminiscent narrative. The first is suggested by Hudson’s title, _Far Away and Long Ago_. Every one likes to know what other people ate and wore and said and did in other times and places. If other people’s experiences interest you, so will yours interest them. In a country so varied in surface and so wide in extent as the United States, scarcely two people in a group of adults will have had exactly the same early surroundings, and if we take into consideration the large admixture of foreigners with their old world background, we must realize that the “step-daughter of the prairie” brings a new vista to the forest bred, and such a book as _Upstream_ records a struggle entirely unknown to those born and reared in typical American security. It is easy enough to see romance in other people’s lives, but it is hard to see it in our own. A friend of mine who was born in a foreign country and whose family was long a part of the diplomatic service in many places tells how as a little girl she once burst out crying in the midst of one of her mother’s stories of her own quiet childhood in an obscure fishing village. “I shall never have any stories to tell my children; I’ve never been anywhere,” sobbed this juvenile globe trotter, consumed with envy of an experience, which, though pale and quiet, had for her the fascination of the remote and the unknown. But even dwellers in the most familiar places have command of a sure spring of interest; for greater than our curiosity about material things is our interest in the inner life of the individual, how and why he laughed or wept, loved or hated--in brief, how he reacted to the elements that the fates mix in some measure in every life. We wish to know not merely what he did, but why he did it, and how he felt about it. Miss Portor’s reminiscences give us only two events, the taking of the two photographs, but she is able to tell us so much about her own feelings toward them, both then and now, that we live with her in those events. If you in like manner seize upon the unforgettable experiences of your own life, the feelings which still burn in your memory, you will not lack material upon which to try your hand.